CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft had an unexpected surprise during its visit to the asteroid Dinkinesh this week. It turns out that Dinkinesh has a tiny companion – a mini moon.
This discovery was made during Wednesday’s flyby of Dinkinesh, located 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) away in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. When the spacecraft was about 270 miles away (435 kilometers), it captured an image of the asteroid-moon pair. Data and images transmitted back to Earth confirmed that Dinkinesh is only about half a mile wide (790 meters), while its accompanying moon is a mere one-tenth of a mile in size (220 meters).
NASA had sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a practice run for its upcoming missions to study larger and more enigmatic asteroids located near Jupiter. Launched in 2021, Lucy is scheduled to reach the first of these Trojan asteroids in 2027 and conduct explorations for at least six years. The original list of seven target asteroids has now expanded to 11. The name “Dinkinesh” means “you are marvelous” in the Amharic language of Ethiopia. It also serves as the Amharic name for Lucy, the famous 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor’s remains found in Ethiopia in the 1970s, after which the spacecraft is named. Southwest Research Institute’s Hal Levison, the lead scientist, expressed, “Dinkinesh really lived up to its name; this is truly marvelous.”
Gary P Hernal started college at UP Diliman and received his BA in Economics from San Sebastian College, Manila, and Masters in Information Systems Management from Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University in Oak Brook, IL. He has 25 years of copy editing and management experience at Thomson West, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters.
