TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Lucy’s spaceship belongs to NASAwhich first launched in 2021 to explore asteroid Trojans that are trapped near Jupiterhas made an interesting discovery.
The spacecraft discovered an asteroid, nicknamed Dinky, that actually has a smaller asteroid orbiting it, as reported by Scientific American. It’s basically a moon with its own moon.
The technical term is a binary asteroid pair and Dinky, whose real name is Dinkinesh, was discovered by Lucy during a fast flight. That’s when the spacecraft spotted a small “moon” orbiting it.
“Binaries are certainly a possibility,” Jessica Sunshine, a planetary scientist at the University of Maryland, told Scientific American. “But it wasn’t expected, and that’s really cool.”
Regarding Dinky and its satellite, NASA scientists still have a long way to go, because only about a third of the relevant data has been sent to Earth. NASA has released a series of images showing Dinky and its pseudo-moon, but no actual data yet.
Advertising
Advertising
But just from these images, you can find out a lot about these two celestial bodies. There is an equatorial ridge visible on the main part of Dinky aka Dinkinesh and a line of secondary ridges branching off from it. The parent asteroid is covered in craters, likely caused by numerous impacts of other asteroids.
Hal Levinson, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and principal investigator of the Lucy mission, said there are many more images coming from secondary satellites and these images show that there are some “interesting” things happening to the junior asteroid. He went on to say that the shape was “very strange.”
Binary asteroid pairs are not rare, as researchers have found that about 15 percent of near-Earth asteroids have cute orbital pairs. NASA and affiliated researchers are still waiting for more data about the pair, including color images and spectroscopy that could provide more clues about the two asteroids. Levinson said “there’s a lot of cool stuff coming.”
Meanwhile, Lucy will continue her original mission, to investigate some mysterious Trojan asteroids near Jupiter. Lucy will make contact with one of them in 2025.
Always update the latest information. Check out breaking news and selected news from Tempo.co on the Telegram channel “Tempo.co Update”. Click to join. You need to install the Telegram application first.
2023-11-05 00:41:35
#NASA #Finds #Dinky #Asteroid #Moon #Jupiter #Tekno #Tempo
