The freshly launched images from NASA’s Lucy spacecraft’s first asteroid flyby reveal that Dinkinesh is really a binary pair. A binary asteroid pair has a bigger most important asteroid and a smaller satellite tv for pc orbiting round it. In the weeks main as much as the flyby, the Lucy group had questioned if Dinkinesh was really a binary system as a result of Lucy’s devices detected the brightness of the asteroid altering over time. This is a signal that one thing is getting in the way in which of the sunshine, seemingly a physique orbiting the principle house rock.
[Related: NASA spacecraft Lucy says hello to ‘Dinky’ asteroid on far-flying mission.]
From a preliminary evaluation of the primary obtainable images, the group estimates that the bigger asteroid physique is roughly 0.5 miles at its widest and that the smaller physique is about 0.15 miles in dimension.
Dinkinesh is one other identify for the Lucy fossil that this mission is named after. The 3.2 million-year-old skeletal stays of a human ancestor had been present in Ethiopia in 1974. The identify Dinkinesh means “marvelous” within the Amharic language.
“Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, mentioned in a assertion. “When Lucy was originally selected for flight, we planned to fly by seven asteroids. With the addition of Dinkinesh, two Trojan moons, and now this satellite, we’ve turned it up to 11.”
The November 1 encounter primarily served as an in-flight check of the asteroid-studying spacecraft. It particularly targeted on testing the system that enables it to autonomously observe an asteroid because it whizzes by at 10,000 miles per hour. The group calls this its terminal monitoring system.
“This is an awesome series of images. They indicate that the terminal tracking system worked as intended, even when the universe presented us with a more difficult target than we expected,” Lockheed Martin steering and navigation engineer Tom Kennedy mentioned in a assertion. “It’s one thing to simulate, test, and practice. It’s another thing entirely to see it actually happen.”
It will take as much as a week for the rest of the information from the flyby to be downloaded to Earth. This week’s encounter was carried out as an engineering verify, however the group’s scientists are hoping this information will assist them glean insights into the character of small asteroids.
“We knew this was going to be the smallest main belt asteroid ever seen up close,” NASA Lucy mission scientist Keith Noll mentioned in a assertion. “The fact that it is two makes it even more exciting. In some ways these asteroids look similar to the near-Earth asteroid binary Didymos and Dimorphos that DART saw, but there are some really interesting differences that we will be investigating.”
[Related: Why scientists are studying the clouds of debris left in DART’s wake.]
The Lucy group plans to make use of this primary flyby information to judge the spacecraft’s habits and put together for its subsequent close-up have a look at an asteroid. This subsequent encounter is scheduled for April 2025, when Lucy is anticipated to fly by the principle belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson. This asteroid is named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johnson, one the scientists who found the Lucy fossils.
Launched in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy mission is the primary spacecraft set to discover the Trojan asteroids. This group of primitive house rocks is orbiting our photo voltaic system’s largest planet Jupiter. They orbit in two swarms, with one shifting forward of Jupiter and the opposite lagging behind it.
There are about 7,000 asteroids on this belt, with the biggest asteroid estimated to be about 160 miles throughout. The asteroids are much like fossils and signify the leftover materials that is nonetheless hanging round after the large planets together with Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune fashioned.
Lucy will then journey into the main Trojan asteroid swarm. After that, the spacecraft will fly previous six Trojan asteroids, together with binary asteroids like Dinkinesh: Eurybates and its satellite tv for pc Queta, Polymele and its but unnamed satellite tv for pc, Leucus, and Orus.
In 2030, Lucy will return to Earth for yet one more bump that may gear it up for a rendezvous with the Patroclus-Menoetius binary asteroid pair within the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm. This mission is scheduled to conclude a while in 2033.