Petit-Prince (moon)

Petit-Prince, also known as (45) Eugenia I, is a small moon that goes around the asteroid 45 Eugenia. It was found in 1998 by astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. At first, it was called S/1998 (45) 1, and later it was named Petit-Prince.

This discovery was important because Petit-Prince was the first moon of an asteroid found from Earth. Before this, the only known moon of an asteroid was Dactyl, which was found by the Galileo space probe around another asteroid called 243 Ida. Finding Petit-Prince helped scientists learn more about how asteroids and their moons form and move in space.

Characteristics

Petit-Prince is a moon that goes around the asteroid named 45 Eugenia. It is much smaller, with a diameter of 13 km, while Eugenia itself is 214 km wide. Petit-Prince finishes one orbit around Eugenia in five days.

Name

The discoverers named this moon after the son of Empress Eugénie, called the Prince Imperial. They also wanted to connect it to the famous children's book The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In this story, a prince lives on an asteroid, like the moon they found.

They said that both the Prince Imperial and the Little Prince were young and brave. They left their comfortable homes—the Little Prince from asteroid B612 and the Prince Imperial from Chislehurst—to travel far away.