624 HEKTOR

'624 Hektor' is the largest of the Jovian Trojan asteroids. It was discovered in 1907 by August Kopff.
Hektor is a D-type asteroid, dark and reddish in colour. It lies in Jupiter's leading Lagrangian point, L₄, called the 'Greek' node after one of the two sides in the legendary Trojan War. Ironically, Hektor is named after the Trojan hero Hektor, and is thus one of two Trojan asteroids that is "misplaced" in the wrong camp (the other being 617 Patroclus in the Trojan node).
Hektor is one of the most elongated bodies of its size in the solar system, being 370 × 200 km. It is thought that Hektor might be a contact binary (two asteroids joined by gravitational attraction) like 216 Kleopatra. Hubble Space Telescope observations of Hektor in 1993 did not show an obvious bilobated shape because of a limited angular resolution. Recent observations recording on July 17 2006 with the Keck-10m II telescope and its Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics system indicate a bilobated shape for Hektor. Additionally, since this AO system provides an excellent and stable correction (angular resolution of 0.060 arcsec in K band), a 15-km moonlet at 1000 km of Hektor's primary was detected. The satellite's provisional designation is S/2006 (624) 1. Hektor is, so far, the only known binary trojan asteroid in the L₄ point and the first Trojan with a satellite companion. 617 Patroclus, another large Trojan asteroid located in the L₅, is composed of two same-sized components.

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Hektor in fiction

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★ IAU circular 8732 - discovery of S/2006 (624)1

Hektor in fiction

:''See Asteroids in fiction.''