In the Solar System · tracked live
Ida
A main-belt asteroid, here because Galileo flew past it in August 1993 on the way to Jupiter - and found the first moon ever seen round an asteroid, a kilometre-wide rock now called Dactyl. Until that picture it was an open question whether such a thing could exist; the moon's orbit also gave the first direct measurement of an asteroid's mass.
- Radius
- 16 km
- Around the equator
- 99 km
- From the Sun
- 424,247,024 km (+69,521 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 543,944,299 km (-1,049,517 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 30 min
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.