On November 1, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft flew by not just its first asteroid — the small main-belt asteroid (152830) Dinkinesh — but its first two. The first images returned by Lucy reveal that Dinkinesh is actually a binary asteroid.
Dinkinesh, also known as 1999 VD57, is a stony asteroid located in the main asteroid belt situated between Mars and Jupiter.
It was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey on November 4, 1999.
It rotates with a period of 52.67 hours and varies in brightness with a light curve amplitude of 0.39 magnitudes.
“Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” said Lucy principal investigator Dr. Hal Levison, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute, referring to the meaning of Dinkinesh (‘you are marvelous’) in Amharic.
“When Lucy was originally selected for flight, we planned to flyby seven asteroids. With the addition of Dinkinesh, two Trojan moons, and now this satellite, we’ve turned it up to 11.”
From a preliminary analysis of the first available images, Dr. Levison and colleagues estimate that the larger body is approximately 790 m (0.5 miles) at its widest, while the smaller is about 220 m (0.15 miles) in size.
This flyby of Dinkinesh primarily served as an in-flight test of the spacecraft, specifically focusing on testing the systems that allow Lucy to autonomously track an asteroid as it flies past at 16,000 km per hour (10,000 mph), referred to as the terminal tracking system.
“We have seen many asteroids up close, and one may think little is left to discover and surprise us. Well, that is clearly wrong,” said Lucy deputy principal investigator Dr. Simone Marchi, also from the Southwest Research Institute.
“Dinkinesh, and its enigmatic moonlet, differ in some interesting ways from the similarly sized near-Earth asteroids that have been seen by spacecraft like OSIRIS-REx and DART.”
“This is an awesome series of images,” said Tom Kennedy,…
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