That’s no moon….Oh, yes it is! (Credits: NASA/JPL).
The asteroid 1998 QE2 which is making its pass this week, apparently has a moon, as shown in the video below.
A flash in the radar image shows the small mass orbiting the 2.7 km wide asteroid. The smaller moon is estimated to be some 610 metres across. The radar images were taken late on Wednesday May 29th using the Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California. There will be many more images and measurements made of this object, as it passes within 5.8 million kilometres from Earth this weekend.
Below, radar images showing the motion of the body:
![A trajectory analysis that used a computational fluid dynamics approach to determine the likely position and velocity histories of the foam (Credits: NASA Ref [1] p61).](https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fluid-dynamics-trajectory-analysis-50x50.jpg)
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