NASA has been exploring asteroid Dinkinesh through its Lucy mission. However, the U.S. space agency was surprised by what they learned about the space rock amid the probe.
Asteroid Dinkinesh Getting Weirder?
NASA's Lucy team made another update about asteroid Dinky less than a week after the spacecraft made its first flyby to the space rock. NASA said in a statement on Tuesday (Nov. 7) that Dinkinesh's smaller satellite is a binary system called "contact binary." The two smaller objects are reportedly in contact with each other, suggesting that Dinky doesn't only have one or two companions but has three components.
"It is puzzling, to say the least," Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute and principal investigator for Lucy said in the statement. "I would have never expected a system that looks like this. In particular, I don't understand why the two components of the satellite have similar sizes. This is going to be fun for the scientific community to figure out."
Contact binary is two stars close to each other whose surfaces are touching. In such a system, it would resemble a peanut. Although contact binary systems appear rather frequent across our solar system, scientists had not observed one orbiting another asteroid before Dinkinesh, per John Spencer, Lucy's deputy project scientist.
Spencer added that they were surprised by the odd variations observed in Dinkinesh's brightness. They speculated that the asteroid may even have a moon while pointing out that they never expected to find such a bizarre observation.
Asteroid Dinky Surprises
Last week, Lucy made a flyby on Dinkinesh, and the astronomers were surprised when they discovered it wasn't alone. The small space rock in the central asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter reportedly has a companion.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, Keith Noll, the scientist working on the Lucy project, admitted that they didn't expect the finding and felt it was thrilling since there were two of them. However, the recent report noted that just six minutes after snapping the photos revealing Dinky wasn't alone, the team discovered that there was a third rock. At the time, the probe had reportedly traveled 960 miles (1,545 kilometers) from where it discovered the first satellite.
Hal said, "Dinkinesh did live up to its name" since it was "marvelous." The addition of Dinkinesh, two Trojan moons, and the most recent satellite raised the ante to eleven.
The Lucy mission discovered interesting information about the asteroid during the flight test. For example, the researchers measured the two space rocks and found that the smaller one is 0.15 miles (220 meters) wide, while the larger one is 0.5 miles (790 meters) across at its widest point. There's no update about the measurement of the third front.
Lucy will send all the data in a week, and NASA staff will need further time to review and interpret it.
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