Discovery of Dia

Dia is a small moon of Jupiter, about four kilometres across, discovered in December 2000 by a team led by Scott Sheppard at the University of Hawaii. Unusually, it was then lost for about ten years because there were not enough observations to fix its orbit, until it was recovered in 2010 and confirmed in the following years. Dia moves in the same direction as Jupiter rotates, unlike most of the distant irregular moons, and belongs to the Himalia group, a family of moons with similar orbits. It received its permanent name in 2015, after a figure from Greek mythology. It is one of the smaller moons of Jupiter and is known only from telescope observations.

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