Discovery of Harpalyke

Harpalyke is a small irregular moon of Jupiter, about four kilometres across, discovered in November 2000 by a team led by Scott Sheppard at the University of Hawaii, using wide-field cameras on telescopes at Mauna Kea. It follows a distant, inclined orbit in the retrograde direction, opposite to the planet's rotation, and belongs to the Ananke group, a family of moons that may be fragments of a single captured body. The provisional designation was replaced in 2002 by its permanent name, taken from a figure of Greek mythology. Like most of Jupiter's small outer moons it is known only from telescope observations.

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