Here's something unusual.  I saw some asteroids in an astronomer's office, and was captivated by the form of this one. Asteroid 216 Kleopatra orbits the sun as part of the asteroid belt, and it's 135 miles long by 58 miles wide (217 x 94km).  In the year 2000 it was scanned by the huge radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory (reported here by Space Science News), and since then scientists have been puzzling about its peculiar "dog-bone" shape. 

The reflectiveness of Kleopatra's surface suggests that it is mostly metallic, and since iron is the most common metal in the solar system, it's probably mostly ferrous.  To match this more closely, instead of printing it in the composite metal I usually use, I've cast it in a steel that's about 99.5% iron. 

I've made only 10 asteroids this year.  Each is unique, with fissures and occasional pits caused by thermal stress as the steel cools from red heat.  They're solid metal, hand-finished with an oil patina, and if I'd known how nice they would be, I'd have made more.  As an artifact it's tremendously satisfying, with a sleek, heavy, authoritative form.  And then to think of it in space, the size of New Jersey...well. Dr. Steven Ostro of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who led the project that observed this body, kindly provided me with the data describing Kleopatra.  At left from the top: raw radar data, reconstructed images, and the shape model derived from them.

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