The little asteroid visited by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft this week had a big surprise for scientists.
It turns out that the asteroid Dinkinesh has a dinky sidekick — a mini moon.
The discovery was made during Wednesday’s flyby of Dinkinesh, 480 million kilometers away in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. The spacecraft snapped a picture of the pair when it was about 435km out, as it passed by at 16,000kph, in what NASA called “a quick hello.”
Photo: NASA via AP
In data and images beamed back to Earth, the spacecraft confirmed that Dinkinesh is barely 790m across. Its closely circling moon is a mere 220m in size.
NASA sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a rehearsal for the bigger, more mysterious asteroids out near Jupiter on its nearly US$1 billion mission. Launched in 2021, the spacecraft is to reach the first of these “Trojan” asteroids in 2027 and explore them for at least six years. The original target list of seven asteroids has grown to 11.
The Trojans are swarms of unexplored asteroids that are considered to be time capsules from the dawn of the solar system. The spacecraft is to swing past eight Trojans believed to be up to 10 to 100 times bigger than Dinkinesh. It is due to zip past the final two asteroids in 2033.
Dinkinesh means “you are marvelous” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia. It is also the Amharic name for Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old remains of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia in the 1970s, for which the spacecraft is named.
“Dinkinesh really did live up to its name. This is marvelous,” Southwest Research Institute researcher Hal Levison, the lead scientist on Lucy, said in a statement.
Until now, Dinkinesh has only been “an unresolved smudge in the best telescopes,” Levison said.
Lucy is next to swing past an asteroid named after one of the fossil Lucy’s discoverers: Donald Johanson.
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