Discovery of Valetudo

Valetudo is a very small moon of Jupiter, about a kilometre across, discovered by a team led by the astronomer Scott Sheppard using wide-field images of Jupiter's surroundings, and announced to the public later. It has an unusual orbit: it travels in the same direction as Jupiter's rotation, but it lies far out among a group of retrograde moons that orbit in the opposite direction, so head-on collisions are possible, and the moon is thought to be a fragment of a once larger body. It was named after the Roman goddess of health and hygiene, a great-granddaughter of Jupiter. It is one of dozens of small, distant moons found around Jupiter since the early 2000s.

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