[X] My Assistant

[volcanopele]

Anyone have a details from the IAU Circular #8980? The subject headers suggest that two satellites have been discovered at 216 Kleopatra, an oddly shaped M-type main belt asteroid.

[Holder of the Tw...]

Did my best, but all I can come up with is the circular itself, which is password protected (you knew that already).

Searching through the MPECs from the MPC, and information on AstDys, didn't turn up anything obvious.

Kleopatra is just a couple weeks past opposition, so whatever observations may be involved could have been very recent.

Back in 1999, there was a lot of discussion of Kleopatra actually being two separate objects in orbit around each other, a binary asteroid. Arecibo observations seemed to indicate, by radar, that it was a single dogbone shaped object, but I'm wondering if maybe this S1 and S2 business might be taking it back the other direction. Just speculating.

Mainly, I'm wondering how you get two smaller satellites into stable orbits around a "dogbone" unless they're really far out.

[David]

They ought to name one of the moons "Caesarion". And the other one, I suppose, "Marcus Antonius".