2023-11-06 13:45:47
On November 1, 2023, NASA’s Lucy space probe flew by not only its first asteroid, but, surprisingly, its first two. This is confirmed by the photos taken by the ship and subsequently transmitted by it to Earth.
These first images reveal that Dinkinesh, in the main asteroid belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is actually a pair of asteroids rather than a single asteroid.
“When Lucy was originally selected for the flight, we planned for her to fly by 7 asteroids. With the addition of Dinkinesh, two Trojan asteroids and now this satellite, we have raised the number to 11,” explains Hal Levison, of the center that the Research Institute of the Southwest (SwRI) is based in Boulder, Colorado, and is a member of the mission’s science team.
In the weeks before the spacecraft’s encounter with the Dinkinesh binary system, the mission’s science team began to suspect that Dinkinesh might be a binary system, as Lucy’s instruments observed that the brightness of the supposedly individual asteroid changed greatly with time. The first images of the meeting have eliminated all doubt. Dinkinesh is a binary system in which both stars orbit each other, although the one with smaller mass and size can be seen as a satellite of the other.
From a preliminary analysis of the first available images, the mission’s scientific team estimates that the largest asteroid of the pair measures approximately 790 meters in its largest part, while the smallest measures about 220 meters.
Los of the asteroids overturned by Lucy. (Photo: NASA Goddard / SwRI / Johns Hopkins APL / NOAO)
The meeting also served as a test of the ship’s proper functioning in real conditions, specifically focusing on testing the system that allows Lucy to autonomously observe an asteroid while it flies past it at about 16,000 kilometers per hour. The meeting has shown that the system works perfectly.
“We knew this was going to be the smallest main belt asteroid of all the flybys. But the fact that there are two of them makes it even more exciting,” said Keith Noll of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “In some ways, this asteroid pair resembles the pair of asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos that the DART spacecraft visited, but there are some really interesting differences that we will investigate.”
Currently, the team is finishing receiving the rest of the data collected during the flyby from Lucy.
If nothing unforeseen arises, the next flyby of an asteroid will be one of the main belt, specifically Donaldjohanson in 2025. And in 2027 it will begin to fly over the main objectives of the mission, the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
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