The word “Dinkinesh” means “great” in Amharic, and Dinkinesh, a small asteroid in the main belt, lives up to Ethiopia’s nickname. The asteroid was discovered when NASA’s Lucy spacecraft flew close to where he expected there to be only one asteroid. 2 asteroids for the price of 1 asteroid.
“Dinkinesh really lived up to its name, which is amazing,” Lucie principal investigator Hal Levison of the San Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute’s Boulder, Colorado, office said in the paper. statement. “When Lucy was first selected for flight, we had plans to fly close to his seven asteroids. With the addition of Dinkinesh, the two Trojans, and now the moon, we We increased that to 11.”
Dinkinespea’s larger asteroid is believed to be approximately half a mile, or 805 meters, wide. Dinkinespea’s small asteroid is thought to be only 0.15 miles, or 220 meters, in diameter. A spokesperson for Lockheed Martin, which partnered with NASA on the Lucy expedition, spoke passionately about the scientific importance of this discovery.
“This is an amazing series of images. They show that the device tracking system worked as intended, even when the universe presented us with a more difficult target than we anticipated.” ” explained Tom Kennedy, Lockheed Martin guidance and navigation engineer. statement. Kennedy mentioned a “device tracking system.” This is because the spacecraft is able to locate objects and keep them in sight even though they are traveling at high speeds. Overall, Lucy’s mission was aimed at testing a wide range of equipment. Asteroids are of interest to astronomers for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they can tell us a lot about our solar system and how its planets formed. Last month, Osiris-Rex — a spacecraft that recently visited the asteroid Bennu, which could collide with Earth in 2182 —