Ida and Dactyl: Asteroid and Moon

This asteroid has a moon. The robotic spacecraft Galileo on route to Jupiter in 1993 encountered and photographed two asteroids all the way in which by its long interplanetary voyage. The 2d minor planet it photographed, 243 Ida, used to be impulsively stumbled on to maintain a moon. The diminutive moon, Dactyl, is fully about 1.6 kilometers all the way in which by and considered as a little dot on the correct of the sharpened featured image. In distinction, the potato-formed Ida is much greater, measuring about 60 kilometers long and 25 km huge. Dactyl is the necessary moon of an asteroid ever stumbled on — now many asteroids are known to maintain moons. The names Ida and Dactyl are from Greek mythology.