Linus (moon)
moon of asteroid Kalliope
Linus, formal designation (22) Kalliope I, is an asteroid moon that orbits the large M-type asteroid 22 Kalliope. It was discovered on August 29, 2001, by astronomers Jean-Luc Margot and Michael E. Brown with the Keck telescope, in Hawaii. Another team also detected the moon with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on September 2, 2001. Both telescopes are on Mauna Kea. It received the provisional designation S/2001 (22) 1, until it was named. The naming proposal appeared in the discovery paper and was approved by the International Astronomical Union in July 2003. Although the naming proposal referred to the mythological Linus, son of the muse Calliope and the inventor of melody and rhythm, the name was also meant to honor Linus Torvalds, inventor of the Linux operating system kernel, and Linus van Pelt, a character in the Peanuts comic strip.
With an estimated 28 ± 2 km (17 ± 1 mi) diameter, Linus is very large compared to most asteroid moons, and would be a sizable asteroid by itself. The only known larger moons in the main belt are the smaller components of the double asteroids 617 Patroclus and 90 Antiope.
It has been estimated that Linus' orbit precesses at quite a rapid rate, making one cycle in several years.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Linus (moon)” as moon of asteroid Kalliope. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1401722. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Linus (moon)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.