And then I thought the same thing after Ida and Dactyl, until NEAR-Shoemaker arrived at the near-Earth asteroid Eros. There’s nothing like being on the front lines of discovery.

It whizzed by Ida going almost 28,000 miles per hour and came within 1,500 ... The International Astronomical Union named the moon Dactyl after a group of mythological beings who lived on a ...

In the mid-1990s, the Galileo spacecraft, on its way to the Jupiter system, captured this mind-blowing image of asteroid 243 Ida and its moon, Dactyl.