Meeny (green) & DGU (brown) – the red dot where their orbits cross is where the discovery was made
It was amateur astronomer Remises Kerman’s first attempt to look for Meeny in the night sky with his new high-powered telescope. He had pulled all the data from the Asteroid Tracking Network database and calculated the trajectory so he would know where and when to point his scope. However he didn’t double-check his calculations, or he probably would have noticed the simple arithmetic error that caused him to point his scope at the wrong section of sky and at the wrong time – Meeny was several hours from being visible at that location. Still, he saw something moving against the backdrop of stars and nebulae over the course of 3 hours of watching. Realizing its motion wasn’t in the proper direction for it to be Meeny and that it was traveling too fast to be a distant object, he continued to study the object for the next night and did a rough calculation of its trajectory to confirm it was orbiting Kerbin. He quickly alerted the ATN, who did follow-up observations to confirm the existence of the asteroid, which they cataloged as DGU-266(B) and is now available on our Flight Tracker. It now falls upon the Kerbal Astronomical Society to choose a name for the object. They are considering sourcing names from the public to help increase outreach and interest in astronomy.
The asteroid is currently predicted to skim through Mun’s SOI again shortly on 2/12, after which astronomers will once more turn their scopes on it for a detailed study of its orbit. Everyone who keeps records of the star fields they observe over time is also checking through their archives to see if they can spot DGU in any of them, to possibly give us a time frame for when the asteroid was captured by Mun. Unlike Meeny, we did not see this capture coming ahead of time and due to its low eccentricity, it’s likely been in orbit for a while now. It’s very likely there have been other small moonlets that have come and gone thanks to Mun without our even knowing they were there.
Remises is still hoping to get a look at Meeny through his ‘scope next time it passes around the night side of Kerbin. He’ll double-check his calculations too he says.
