Tuesday Trivia - 243 Ida edition
Aug. 28th, 2018 09:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris_gerribA preview of the trivia section for this week's newsletter of the Darien Rotary Club:
On this date in 1993, NASA’s Galileo unmanned probe, on its way to Jupiter for a multi-year mission, flew by the asteroid 243 Ida. During the fly-by, the probe discovered that the asteroid had a natural moon. The moon was named Dactyl and is believed to be either a fragment of Ida or another piece of the same object from which Ida was created. Although the Galileo spacecraft has had a massively-successful mission, it suffered from a major flaw with its radio antenna, making data downloads to Earth very slow. As a result, the images with Ida’s moon were not studied by NASA until February 1994.
On this date in 1993, NASA’s Galileo unmanned probe, on its way to Jupiter for a multi-year mission, flew by the asteroid 243 Ida. During the fly-by, the probe discovered that the asteroid had a natural moon. The moon was named Dactyl and is believed to be either a fragment of Ida or another piece of the same object from which Ida was created. Although the Galileo spacecraft has had a massively-successful mission, it suffered from a major flaw with its radio antenna, making data downloads to Earth very slow. As a result, the images with Ida’s moon were not studied by NASA until February 1994.
