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Moon (Dactyl) Discoved Orbiting Asteroid Ida

Posted by chrisd on from the trying-to-resist-bad-uranus/asteroids-joke dept.

Dot.Sig writes "Here is a picture and short description of an asteroid with its own moon." Taken by galileo during it's trip to jupiter. Sort of like those pics you take out the car window.... Here is the requisite NASA Press Release. Who names these thing, anyway? Not the first asteroid to be found to have a moon, but interesting regardless.

2 of 16 comments (clear)

  1. Re:who names these things? by brsmith4 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Mod parent down to flamebait. Im sure the poster knew what organization named the damn thing, he was probably asking something like 'WTF type of people name these things?' It must suck to have the insight of a two year old.

  2. Old News by TheWanderingHermit · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I don't know when the picture was taken (someone here said 1993), but I've had that same picture in use on my desktop as wall paper from time to time since within a year after I switched from Amiga to Wintel (which was about 1996 or 1997) an I've still been using it since I switche to Linux. So I know, from personal experience that pic is at least 5 years old (and I mean literally that pic -- I got it from Views of the Solar System in 1996 when I was researching a project for a teaching seminar) (sorry I don't remember the url for Views of the Solar System, but it's easy to find in Google or Yahoo).