90482 Orcus given the designation S/2005 (90482) 1 before later being named "Vanth". It orbits Orcus in a nearly face-on circular orbit with an eccentricity of about 0.007, and an orbital period of 9.54 days. Vanth orbits only from Orcus and is too close to Orcus for ground-based spectroscopy to determine the surface composition of the satellite. Mike Brown suspects that like the Pluto–Charon system, Orcus and Vanth are tidally locked. Vanth does not resemble known collisional satellites because its spectrum is very different from that of its primary, and it may be a captured KBO. Vanth could also have originated as
90482 Orcus quoted Taaffe as saying that if Vanth "accompanies dead souls from the moment of death to the underworld itself, then of course her face is turned always toward Orcus", a reference to the likely synchronous orbit of Vanth about Orcus. 90482 Orcus 90482 Orcus ( ), provisional designation , is a trans-Neptunian object from the Kuiper belt with a large moon, Vanth. It was discovered on 17 February 2004, by American astronomers Michael Brown of Caltech, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory, and David Rabinowitz of Yale University. It is probably a dwarf planet. Precovery images taken by the Palomar