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by isoprophlex 1830 days ago
It's a dwarf planet of ~ 200 km diameter. The thing has a miniscule gravity well, it won't matter much compared to launching from earth and matching orbits with it, i think...
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For comparison, that's about 10% of the Moon's diameter, i.e. 0.1% of its volume. (The mass ratios are probably within that 0.1% ballpark, but can't tell for sure until we know more about its composition.)
IMHO beign able to spot something with this size at this distance is really awesome.
Interestingly, the images came from the Dark Energy Survey [1], which for entirely different different reasons is running a very sensitive and high-resolution scan of the sky in visible and near-infrared. This just happened to show up in a frame where they were looking for distant galaxies and events, and the Minor Planets Center noticed the thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Energy_Survey