Petit-Prince (moon)

Petit-Prince, also known as (45) Eugenia I, is a small moon that orbits the asteroid 45 Eugenia. It was discovered in 1998 by astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope located on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. At first, it was given a temporary name, S/1998 (45) 1, before being officially named Petit-Prince.

This discovery was special because Petit-Prince was the first moon of an asteroid found using a telescope on Earth. Before this, the only known moon of an asteroid was Dactyl, which was discovered 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 orbits the asteroid named 45 Eugenia. It is much smaller, with a diameter of 13 km, while Eugenia itself is 214 km wide. Petit-Prince completes one orbit around Eugenia in five days.

Name

The discoverers named this moon after the son of Empress Eugénie, known as 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, much like the moon they found.

They explained that both the Prince Imperial and the Little Prince shared similarities. Both were young and brave, not afraid of danger. They both left their comfortable homes—the Little Prince from asteroid B612 and the Prince Imperial from Chislehurst—to travel far away. Both eventually ended up in Africa.