TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – During Lucy’s ride NASA drove past asteroid Dinkinesh at 10,000 mph, mission scientists saw a surprise: This asteroid was actually two asteroid.
The space agency discovered that a smaller space rock about 720 feet (220 meters) wide orbits the half-mile (790 meters) wide Dinkinesh. Now, upon closer inspection, they realized that the smaller asteroid was actually two asteroids.
“As NASA’s Lucy spacecraft continues to return data on its first asteroid encounter on November 1, 2023, the team was surprised to discover that the unexpected Dinkinesh satellite itself is a contact binary, that is, it is made of two small objects that are in contact with each other,” wrote NASA in its update, as quoted by Mashable, November 9 2023.
In this image taken from a distance of 1,010 miles (1,630 km), Dinkinesh is visible on the left and an interesting contact binary on the right.
The Lucy mission, which is on its way to the mysterious and unexplored asteroid Trojan, is caught in two swarms around Jupiter and is thought to be the planet’s pristine building blocks.
Advertising
Advertising
The mission’s first targets are now known to be three asteroids. This is a target mission planners want to visit before reaching Trojan, to test the spacecraft’s critical ability to track these distant objects at very high speeds.
This is the first contact binary asteroid ever discovered by planetary scientists in orbit around another space rock.
“We haven’t seen many asteroids up close, and we’ve never seen one orbiting another asteroid,” said John Spencer, the mission’s deputy project scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, in a statement.
“We’ve been puzzled about the strange variations in Dinkinesh’s brightness that we saw on approach, which gave us hints that Dinkinesh might have some kind of moon, but we never suspected anything this strange!”
The Lucy mission, named after the ancient remains of a famous human fossil skeleton, will traverse the solar system, without slowing down, to investigate half a dozen Trojan asteroids. They are like “fossils” from the formation of our solar system about 4 billion years ago.
Trojans are a type of small rocky and icy body that contributed to the formation of various planets. This will help researchers understand how Earth and other planets formed.
Each encounter will travel at around 10,000 mph, capturing a lot of information with a variety of cameras, including one camera (a spectrometer) that can deduce what the asteroid is made of.
“We won’t be able to blink,” Hal Levison, a planetary scientist who led the unprecedented mission to investigate the Trojans, told Mashable last year.
Always update latest information. Listen breaking news and selected news from Tempo.co on the Telegram channel “Tempo.co Update”. Click to join. You need to-install Telegram application first.
2023-11-10 02:28:43
#NASA #Spacecraft #Finds #Small #Asteroids #Orbiting #Asteroid #Dinkinesh #Tekno #Tempo
