JAKARTA – The Lucy spacecraft belonging to the United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shared new information about the natural satellite orbiting the asteroid Dinkinesh.
On November 1, Lucy encountered this satellite for the first time. These findings were surprising enough for Lucy’s team, but the latest data surprised them even more. The reason is, this satellite does not move itself.
Picture downlink from Lucy shows that the Dinkinesh satellite is a contact binary. This means that this satellite is made of two small objects that touch each other so that the two satellites move simultaneously.
“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 expected something this strange,” said Project Lucy Deputy John Spencer.
Spencer wasn’t the only one who was surprised. The Principal Investigator of the Lucy Research Project, Hal Lebison, also feels the same way. According to him, these findings are so confusing and interesting at the same time.
“I never thought the system would look like this. In particular, I don’t understand why the two components of the satellite are similar in size. “This would be a fun thing for the scientific community to know,” Levison said.
Dinkinesh and his satellites are not the main focus of Lucy. This NASA aircraft was launched to explore another asteroid that had never been visited before, namely the Jupiter Trojan.
Dinkinesh and its satellite are two of eleven asteroids Lucy will explore during her 12-year journey. The plan is that Lucy will observe the Donaldjohanson asteroid in 2025 and the Trojan asteroid in 2027.
Tag: nasa space satellite
2023-11-08 16:05:00
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