#moonlet

i want to give this bull a smoochie on his forehead. and maybe cuddle a little.

bulls always look so smoochable! and bears.

I'm currently riding a joy high since @br41nr0t-101 drew fanart of Crescent (Batman + Moondrop from my Batfam au), so here's Crescent's faithful sidekick/brother...

Moonlet (<- Name literally translates to Mini-Moon🤣)

His colors are the same as Lunar's but with a lot more gold and white tossed in. (I seriously need to start coloring these guys in)

Newly christened “Dimorphos” is a tiny space rock with a big target on its back.

The International Astronomical Union gave the rock an official name on June 23 for a unique reason: It has been marked for the first-ever asteroid deflection mission. A NASA spacecraft will ram into Dimorphos — on purpose — to alter its path through space. Although Dimorphos is not at risk of striking Earth, its nearness to the planet makes it a prime testing ground for a technique to ward off dangerous asteroids in the future (SN: 5/2/17).

Dimorphos is a moonlet asteroid that orbits a larger asteroid known as Didymos. Until now, the moonlet has gone by cute nicknames only, like “Didymoon,” or the ugly designation “S/2003 (65803) 1.” Its new moniker, Dimorphos, is Greek for “having two forms,” in honor of the two different trajectories it will have before and after the spacecraft knocks it askew. At just 160 meters across, about the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt, Dimorphos is one of the smallest objects to earn an official name from the IAU.

NASA will launch the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft in July 2021 to crash-land on Dimorphos in September 2022, about 11 million kilometers from Earth (SN: 8/23/19). The collision should nudge Dimorphos into a tighter orbit around Didymos — a change that’s much easier to measure than knocking a solo asteroid into a slightly different orbit around the sun, says Kleomenis Tsiganis, a planetary scientist at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, who is working on the DART mission and suggested the name Dimorphos.

Was trying to get sneaky pictures of Moonlet but she noticed and came to the front to pose.

Bonus: I tried to get the catfish and she photobombed them: