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Skamandrios is a tiny moon of the large asteroid 624 Hektor, one of the Trojan asteroids that gather around one of the Langrange points on Jupiter's orbit. Specifically, Hektor falls among the Trojans at Langrange point L4, orbiting 60° ahead of the giant planet. Hektor's moon Skamandrios takes its name from Skamandrius, a soldier in the Trojan army led by Hector.*
Hektor is not only the largest of the Trojan asteroids, but also notable as being extraordinarily elongated in form. It seems likely to be a contact binary, actually a pair of asteroids that have impacted one another and been held in contact through their mutual gravity (there are indeed several other such contact binaries among the Trojan asteroids). On this model, Skamandrios would represent a fragment of debris thrown out during the formation of this double asteroid, which then fell into orbit around the huge resulting object.
Skamandrios is estimated to be just ten to fifteen kilometres in diameter (by comparison, the elongated structure of its parent Hektor is more than four hundred kilometres on its longest axis). Skamandrios has a highly eccentric orbit, with a semi-major axis of 624 km, an orbit that it completes in period of just under three days.
* Jupiter's Trojan asteroids are divided into two 'camps', named for the sides during the Trojan War: the Greek node that precedes Jupiter in its orbit, and the Trojan node that follows the planet. In the epic tale of the Iliad, Hector was a prince of the Trojans, but for historical reasons the asteroid named Hektor is actually in the 'wrong' camp, the Greek node. As a Trojan soldier in the epic, Skamandrios, too, is in the 'wrong' camp, but its name is nonetheless a suitable one for the companion of an asteroid named for Hector of Troy.
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