The NASA mission's first close flyby came with an exciting surprise: Dinkinesh is a binary asteroid featuring not one but two space rocks.
As NASA’s Lucy spacecraft zoomed past its first asteroid on Wednesday, its mission scientists made a surprising discovery of a bonus space rock. The first images sent over by the Lucy mission of its brief rendezvous with the main asteroid belt revealed a binary pair, with a tiny satellite closely orbiting Dinkinesh, NASA announced on Thursday. Dinkinesh, which roughly translates to “marvelous” in Amharic, is around 0.5 miles at its widest, while its smaller companion is about 0.15 miles in size.
“We knew this was going to be the smallest main belt asteroid ever seen up close,” Keith Noll, Lucy project scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in the statement. “The fact that it is two makes it even more exciting.” The close flyby lasted for roughly eight minutes, during which Lucy collected data on the asteroid using its color imager and infrared spectrometer that comprise the L’Ralph instrument.
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