NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captures its first images of asteroid Dinkinesh

The small dot transferring in opposition to the background of stars is the primary view from NASA’s Lucy spacecraft of the principle belt asteroid Dinkinesh, the primary of 10 asteroids that the spacecraft will go to on its 12-year voyage of discovery. Lucy captured these two photographs on Sept. 2 and 5, 2023. On the left, the picture blinks between these first two photographs of Dinkinesh. On the best, the asteroid is circled to help the attention.

Lucy took these photographs whereas it was 14 million miles (23 million km) away from the asteroid, which is just a couple of half-mile large (1 km). Over the subsequent two months, Lucy will proceed towards Dinkinesh till its closest approach of 265 miles (425 km) on Nov. 1, 2023.

The Lucy crew will use this encounter as a chance to check out spacecraft systems and procedures, specializing in the spacecraft’s terminal monitoring system, designed to maintain the asteroid inside the devices’ fields of view because the spacecraft flies by at 10,000 mph (4.5 km/s).

Lucy will proceed to picture the asteroid over the subsequent months as a part of its optical navigation program, which makes use of the asteroid’s obvious place in opposition to the star background to find out the relative place of Lucy and Dinkinesh to make sure an correct flyby. Dinkinesh will stay an unresolved level of sunshine in the course of the lengthy strategy and will not begin to present floor element till the day of the encounter.

The brightest star on this subject of view is HD 34258, a 7.6 magnitude star within the constellation Auriga that’s too dim to be seen by the bare eye from Earth. At this distance, Dinkinesh is just 19 magnitude, about 150,000 occasions fainter than that star. Celestial north is to the best of the body, which is about 74,500 miles throughout (120,000 km).

The observations have been made by Lucy’s high-resolution digital camera, the L’LORRI instrument—brief for Lucy LOng Vary Reconnaissance Imager—supplied by the Johns Hopkins Utilized Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.