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The asteroid Euterpe takes its name from one of the Greek muses, specifically from the muse of lyric poetry, and is one of a group of five given such names by their discoverer John Russell Hind (the others being Melpomene, Kalliope, Thalia and Urania). Euterpe follows a path through the inner part of the Asteroid Belt, completing each orbit in a little over three and a half years.
Euterpe is a rocky body with an irregular shape, measuring more than a hundred kilometres along its longest axis. It is the largest member and parent body of a group known as the Euterpe family, a collection of more than four hundred stony asteroids that share similar motions through the Asteroid Belt. This implies that they originated together in a collision in the distant past, in which Euterpe and its companion asteroids were broken away from an original larger stony mass.
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