NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL
The Lucy mission took additional images revealing that asteroid Dinkinesh (left) has a contact binary companion, two space rocks that are in contact with each other.
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The tiny asteroid Dinkinesh, visited by NASA’s Lucy mission last week, continues to surprise us.
Lucy flew into the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter on November 1 as part of a test of the spacecraft’s instruments before tackling the mission’s main goal of investigating a group of Trojan asteroids around Jupiter. was shaken by a space stone. Dinkinesh’s flight, which means “great” in the Ethiopian Amharic language, wasn’t even added to Lucy’s itinerary until January.
But the first views captured by Lucy’s instruments showed there was more to this shadowy asteroid than expected. Initially, the images suggested that: The space rock was part of a binary pairthere is a small asteroid orbiting Dinkinesh.
NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins University APL/NOIRLab
The first images taken by the spacecraft during its closest approach revealed the companion star, but not the fact that it was a contact binary.
However, additional images taken by the spacecraft shortly after its closest flyby revealed that the small asteroid is actually a contact binary, two small space rocks touching each other.
During its closest approach, Lucy came within 265 miles (about 425 kilometers) of the asteroid’s surface, and that’s when the first images were taken. The second image NASA shared on Tuesday revealing the contact binary was taken six minutes later from 1,010 miles (about 1,630 kilometers) away.
“Contact binaries appear to be fairly common in the solar system,” John Spencer, Lucy deputy project scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement.
“We haven’t seen much up close, and we’ve never seen an asteroid orbiting another asteroid.
We were puzzled by the strange changes in Dinkinesh’s brightness that we saw on approach, which gave us a hint that Dinkinesh might have some sort of moon, but we doubted anything this strange. I’ve never done that before!”
This approach was primarily designed to help test the Lucy spacecraft’s terminal tracking system. This will allow the spacecraft to autonomously locate the space rock and keep it within its line of sight while flying at 10,000 miles per hour (4.5 kilometers per second). The system exceeded expectations, allowing astronomers to discover Dinkinesh’s unexpected companion.
NASA/Goddard/SwRI
This graphic shows the trajectory of the Lucy spacecraft as it flew near Dinkinesh and captured images revealing the asteroid’s surprising companion.
“It’s puzzling, to say the least,” Lucie principal investigator Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute said in a statement. “I never expected a system like this to come out. Especially for satellites, I don’t understand why the two components are similar in size. It will be fun for the scientific community to figure this out.” ”
Data from the flyby is still being transmitted from the spacecraft to the mission team.
“It’s truly amazing when nature surprises us with new puzzles,” Tom Statler, NASA’s Lucy program scientist, said in a statement. “Great science prompts us to ask questions we never thought we needed to ask.”
Lucy’s next close encounter will be with another main-belt asteroid called Donald Johansson in 2025. And the spaceship leaves to see the Trojans.
Trojan asteroids, which borrow their name from Greek mythology, orbit the sun in two clusters. One is in front of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, and the other is behind Jupiter. Too far away to see in detail with a telescope, the asteroid will be seen in close-up when Lucy reaches the Trojan in his 2027 year.
The name of this mission is lucy’s fossil, the remains of an ancient human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. This skeleton will help researchers piece together aspects of human evolution, and NASA’s Lucy team members hope their mission will accomplish a similar feat regarding the history of the solar system.
Asteroids are like fossils themselves, representing the hanging remnants of the solar system’s giant planets after they were formed, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.