Squannit (moon)
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The discovery of Squannit was made by a Czech astronomer team led by Petr Pravec and Lenka Kotková (-Šarounová) from the Ondřejov suggested by photometric observations on June 19, 2000,[1] which was later confirmed by radar observations from the Arecibo Observatory by a team led by Steven J. Ostro until the official discovery on May 21, 2001.[2]
The discovery was announced by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) two days later on 23 May 2001. On August 27, 2019, the Minor Planet Center announced, that in analogy to the parent asteroid it was given the name Squannit, after the wife of Moshup, who was a medicine woman of the Makiawisug (little people) people.
Track properties
Squannite orbits the common barycenter on a right-hand and retrograde, almost circular orbit at an average distance of 2.548 km from the planetoid, which corresponds to 3.9 Moshup radii or 11.3 squannite radii. The moon takes 17 hours 25.2 minutes to complete one orbit, which corresponds to about 259 orbits in a Moshup year. The orbital eccentricity is 0.0004, the orbit is inclined 156.1° relative to the equator of Moshup. This puts the Moon well within Moshup's Hill sphere of 22 km.
In this binary system, a month lasts 6.3 days.
