524522 Zoozve

This asteroid is smaller than a kilometre and it's unique in that its a quasi-satellite of Venus, because while it orbits the sun its orbit is the same length as Venus and roughly aligned, meaning that it follows it like a long distance shadow. Zoozve is known to be very elongated too.

My fav thing about Zoozve itself is the cute origin of its name: A podcast host's kid had a solar system poster on their wall with a moon of Venus labeled, and contacted NASA confused about it because no 'moons' of Venus were known to exist. He called it Zoozve but it was a misinterpretation of 2002 VE (a more typical name for an asteroid). https://radiolab.org/podcast/zoozve And this eventually led to the asteroid being formally named Zoozve.

Every ~8 years it makes a close approach to earth, roughly ~0.05 AU (from wikipedia), and the next approach like this is today November 2 2026! Hoping it gets another observation and maybe more is discovered about it.

(This was inspired by the previous megathread about favourite celestial bodies.)

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