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(music throughout)

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On January 9, 2020, NASA’s Lucy Mission Team revealed that it would be visiting not seven asteroids as planned, but eight.

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As it turns out, Eurybates, one of the Trojan asteroids along Lucy’s path,

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has a small satellite or moonlet orbiting it.

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Finding these tiny, new worlds before Lucy is launched in 2021 means that

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the team can investigate their orbits and plan for more detailed follow-up observations during fly-bys.

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Dr. Keith Noll and other Lucy science team members

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have been using the Hubble Space Telescope to search for satellites and rings around Lucy’s targets.

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This can be challenging

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since the raw images are often filled with bumps, blobs and diffraction spikes.

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The Lucy team didn’t see any evidence of a new satellite until November 2019.

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After experimenting with the brightness and contrast on the Hubble images,

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Dr. Noll saw a peculiar, faint spot near the much brighter Eurybates.

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Dr. Mike Brown, another team member,

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noticed the spot showed up in a slightly different position

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on another set of Hubble images taken two days later

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This change suggested that the spot was an orbiting satellite.

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The team went back to Hubble and got 3 more chances to make observations of the possible new satellite.

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On the first two tries, the little moonlet was nowhere to be found.

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But on the third observation on January 3rd, 2020 they found the possible new satellite again

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It was clearly visible next to Eurybates, which is over 6000 times brighter.

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This huge difference in brightness suggests that the satellite is less than 1 kilometer in diameter,

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very small compared to Eurybates at 64 kilometers.

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With a few more Hubble observations

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the team pinned down the new satellite's orbit

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And they proposed a name

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The International Astronomical Union approved

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and from now on the little satellite will be known as "Queta" after Enriqueta Basilio

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the first woman to light the Olympic cauldron

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Evidence indicates that the Trojan Asteroid Eurybates

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is the largest fragment from a massive asteroid collision that happened billions of years ago

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It is possible that the new satellite, Queta, is a remnant of that catastrophic event.

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Whether with Hubble or with the Lucy spacecraft’s flyby,

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each observation enriches our understanding about the Trojan asteroids’ formation

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and Eurybates’ relationship with its newly discovered companion.

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The discovery of this new moonlet around the Trojan asteroid Eurybates

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is just a preview of the incredible scientific knowledge

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that will be captured by the Lucy mission as it explores this area of our Solar System.