During its journey to the asteroid Dinkinesh, NASA's spacecraft Lucy made an extraordinary discovery. Lucy discovered the asteroid Dinkinesh is a system of two, with a small 220m-wide satellite revolving around it, during its first flyby. The asteroid and its 'mini-moon' were captured by the spacecraft at a distance of 270 miles (434 km).
Dinkinesh is about a half-mile away
According to the details and the photographs sent to Earth by the mission, the asteroid Dinkinesh is just about a half-mile (790 metres). Its moon is only one-tenth of a mile (220 metres) in diameter.
An astronomer and Lucy project scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre, Keith Noll, in its news release, said, "We knew this was going to be the smallest main belt asteroid we'd ever seen up close. The fact that there are two makes it more exciting." Asteroid Dinkinesh and its newly discovered moon are located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter's orbits, at about 300 million miles (480 million km) from Earth.
Name Dinkinesh mean
The principal investigator for Lucy from Southwest Research Institute, Han Levinson, said, "Asteroid Dinkinesh truly lived up to its name; that is certainly marvellous." According to the Ethiopian Amharic, Dinkinesh means 'you are marvellous.'
According to the Guidance and navigation engineer at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado, Tom Kennedy, "The images are fantastic. They show that the terminal tracking system performed as predicted, even when the universe presented us with a more difficult target than anticipated."
To downlink the remaining encounter data from the spacecraft, the team will require a week. This data will be used to assess the spacecraft's performance during the encounter and to prepare for the next close-up encounter with an asteroid, the main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, in 2025.
NASA's Lucy spacecraft's main mission is to explore Trojans
NASA sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a practice run for larger, more puzzling asteroids near Jupiter. The Trojans are a set of eight asteroids that are the mission's primary targets. The spacecraft, which will be launched in 2021, will reach the first of these so-called Trojan asteroids in 2027 and will spend at least six years exploring them. The original target list of seven asteroids has advanced to eleven.
According to Live Science, Trojan asteroids are believed to be made of the same ancient material that produced the planets of the outer solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. They may hold important insights into the creation of the solar system more than 4 billion years ago.
