Asteroid Dinkinesh has its own moon, pictures sent by Lucy mission show

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft flew past asteroid Dinkinesh on Nov 1, marking its first flyby since its launch. But to everyone’s surprise, asteroid Dinkinesh is not one but actually made up of two tiny space rocks. This means, Lucy has flown past two small asteroids in a single shot, making this a one-of-a-kind event in space exploration.

Lucy zoomed by the small asteroid Dinkinesh, also known as Dinky, on Wednesday and sent back its images to Earth. These images revealed that Dinkinesh has an even smaller space rock orbiting it, which is essentially its "satellite".Scientists at NASA were amazed at this discovery and called it “marvellous.”

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Han Levinson, who is the principal investigator for Lucy from Southwest Research Institute, said, “Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvellous.” He was referring to the meaning of Dinkinesh in the Amharic language, “marvellous.”

Asteroid Dinkinesh is actually a binary unit

This discovery doesn’t come as a surprise to NASA scientists though, as the Lucy team has been wondering for quite a long time if Dinkinesh might be a binary unit, i.e., is it made up of two extremely tiny space rocks? The observation was based on Lucy's instrument’s readings as it measured a change in the brightness with time. But as the images came, all doubts were cleared.

Dinkinesh is a close binary. From a preliminary analysis of the first available images, the team estimates that the larger body is approximately 0.5 miles (790 m) at its widest, while the smaller is about 0.15 miles (220 m) in size, NASA said in a press release.

The team believe that this encounter has served as an in-flight test of the spacecraft, specifically focusing on testing the system that allows Lucy to autonomously track an asteroid while flying past at 10,000 mph. This system is referred to as the terminal tracking system.

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“This is an awesome series of images. They indicate that the terminal tracking system worked as intended, even when the universe presented us with a more difficult target than we expected,” said Tom Kennedy, guidance and navigation engineer at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado.

The Lucy team will now take another week to completely unravel, or in this case, downlink all the data coming from the spacecraft. The team will use this data to evaluate the spacecraft’s behaviour during the encounter and to prepare for the next close-up look at the main belt asteroid, Donaldjohanson, in 2025.

(With inputs from agencies)