NASA’s Lucy spacecraft discovers 2nd asteroid during Dinkinesh flyby

On Nov. 1, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft flew by not simply its first asteroid, however its first two. The primary pictures returned by Lucy reveal that the small fundamental belt asteroid Dinkinesh is definitely a binary pair.

“Dinkinesh actually did stay as much as its identify; that is marvelous,” stated Hal Levison, referring to the that means of Dinkinesh within the Amharic language, “marvelous.” Levison is principal investigator for Lucy from the Boulder, Colorado, department of the San-Antonio-based Southwest Analysis Institute. “When Lucy was initially chosen for flight, we deliberate to fly by seven asteroids. With the addition of Dinkinesh, two Trojan moons, and now this satellite, we have turned it as much as 11.”

Within the weeks previous to the spacecraft’s encounter with Dinkinesh, the Lucy workforce had questioned if Dinkinesh is likely to be a binary system, given how Lucy’s devices had been seeing the asteroid’s brightness altering with time. The primary pictures from the encounter eliminated all doubt. Dinkinesh is a detailed binary. From a preliminary evaluation of the primary accessible pictures, the workforce estimates that the bigger physique is roughly 0.5 miles (790 m) at its widest, whereas the smaller is about 0.15 miles (220 m) in dimension.

This encounter primarily served as an in-flight take a look at of the spacecraft, particularly specializing in testing the system that permits Lucy to autonomously monitor an asteroid because it flies previous at 10,000 mph, known as the terminal monitoring system.

“That is an superior sequence of pictures. They point out that the terminal monitoring system labored as supposed, even when the universe offered us with a tougher goal than we anticipated,” stated Tom Kennedy, steerage and navigation engineer at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado. “It is one factor to simulate, take a look at, and apply. It is one other factor totally to see it truly occur.”

Whereas this encounter was carried out as an engineering take a look at, the workforce’s scientists are excitedly poring over the information to glean insights into the character of small asteroids.

“We knew this was going to be the smallest fundamental belt asteroid ever seen up shut,” stated Keith Noll, Lucy venture scientist from NASA’s Goddard House Flight Heart in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The truth that it’s two makes it much more thrilling. In some methods these asteroids look just like the near-Earth asteroid binary Didymos and Dimorphos that DART noticed, however there are some actually attention-grabbing variations that we are going to be investigating.”

It should take as much as every week for the workforce to downlink the rest of the encounter information from the spacecraft. The workforce will use this information to judge the spacecraft’s habits through the encounter and to arrange for the subsequent close-up take a look at an asteroid, the principle belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, in 2025. Lucy will then be well-prepared to come across the mission’s fundamental targets, the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, beginning in 2027.