Lucy Mission's Target Asteroid Dinky Has a Twist; Small Space Rock Dinkinesh Has Companion

NASA's Lucy targets the small space rock, Dinkinesh, for its mission. However, the team was surprised that the asteroid had a companion.

NASA's Lucy On Asteroid Dinky

NASA's Lucy made a flyby on Dinkinesh, a minor space rock located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, on Wednesday (Nov. 1). Lucy was only expecting one asteroid but raced past two space rocks because the probe discovered that Dinkinesh-whose name translates to "marvelous" from Amharic-is a component of a binary system. An already historic rendezvous gained much more excitement with the finding.

According to a statement released on Thursday by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, Keith Noll, the scientist working on the Lucy project, they were aware that Dinky was going to be the smallest main belt asteroid ever seen up close. However, they didn't expect it to have a companion.

It's much more thrilling since there are two of them, Noll added. He mentioned NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, which crashed deliberately into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos in September 2022. He noted that there were interesting differences that they would investigate, noting that "in some ways, these asteroids look similar to the near-Earth asteroid binary Didymos and Dimorphos that DART saw."

Lucy's lead investigator, Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute, remarked in the same announcement that "Dinkinesh really did live up to its name" because it was "marvelous." According to him, they had seven asteroids to fly by when Lucy launched. The discovery turned it up to eleven with the inclusion of Dinkinesh, two Trojan moons, and the recent satellite.

Although the discovery was primarily a test, the mission found interesting information about the asteroid. For instance, the researchers learned the two space rocks' size, noting that the larger one is 0.5 miles (790 meters) across at its widest point, while the smaller one is 0.15 miles (220 meters) wide. It will take a week for Lucy to send all the data and more time for NASA officials to analyze it.

ALSO READ: NASA Unveils Trio of Mini Robots As New Moon Rovers [Watch]

Lucy Mission

In October 2021, Lucy was launched on a mission to fly by six Trojan asteroids, which are space objects that circle Jupiter. According to NASA experts, Lucy's findings will provide insight into the genesis and evolution of our cosmic neighborhood, as these asteroids are remnants of the early solar system.

After its first discovery in 199, the asteroid Dinkinesh was assigned the temporary name 1999 VD57. After learning about its orbit, it was given an official number (152830) a few years later. However, like many asteroids in the asteroid belt, it remains unnamed.

However, the team selected it as the initial target and dubbed it the project's inspiration because of NASA's Lucy mission. The probe is named after the fossil that transformed our understanding of human development, Noll previously said. They hope the mission will have a similar revolutionary effect on our understanding of solar system evolution.

NASA stated in a press release that the primary goal of adding Dinkinesh to the mission's already jam-packed trip was to test the spacecraft's cutting-edge terminal tracking system, which will accurately picture the mission during the high-speed encounter.