Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2022

JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022 T hese eleven images are of the asteroid Kleopa- tra, viewed at different an- gles as it rotates. The images were taken at dif- ferent times between 2017 and 2019 with the Spectro- Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s VLT. [ESO/Vernazza, Marchis et al./MISTRAL al- gorithm (ONERA/CNRS)] T his animation shows where the orbit of the asteroid Kleopatra (in red) is in our Solar System. Kleopatra orbits the Sun in the Aster- oid Belt, which is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. [ESO /spaceengine.org ] by a thick “neck”. In 2008, Marchis and his colleagues discovered that Kleopatra is orbited by two moons, named AlexHelios and CleoSelene, after the Egyptian queen’s children. To find out more about Kleopatra, Marchis and his team used snap- shots of the asteroid taken at dif- ferent times between 2017 and 2019 with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s VLT. As the asteroid was rotating, they were able to view it from different angles and to create the most accu- rate 3D models of its shape to date. They constrained the asteroid’s dog-bone shape and its volume, finding one of the lobes to be larger