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On its first asteroid flyby on Nov. 1,NASA ’s Lucy mission discovered that themain belt asteroid Dinkinesh has a modest moon orbiting it . Now , extra images have revealed another surprise : Dinkinesh ’s moonlight is not one , but two humble satellites . The duplicate moon ab initio appeared as one because they are so closelipped together , they touch as they orb .
Dinkinesh — dear known as " Dinky " — is about 2,500 pes ( 790 meters ) in diam , making it the small primary bang asteroid ever explore by a spacecraft . Astronomers have been observe Dinkinesh since 1999 , and they knew that the asteroid was passably unusual by the style its brightness fluctuated . But they did not anticipate that the diminutive asteroid was harbor a moon — have alone two . base on Lucy ’s images , its lunar month appear to be a combined 720 feet ( 220 m ) around .
Dinky asteroid’s hidden ‘moon’ is actually two moons in disguise.
When a pair of ethereal target orbit this close together , scientists call it a " contact binary . " These binaries collectively take on a peanut or pear material body , and they may not be rare in thesolar arrangement . For exemplar , the New Horizons spacecraftconfirmed that Arrokoth , an icy physical object in the Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune , was a middleman binary in 2019 . A handful of other asteroids and comet seem to be contact lens binary star as well .
What make Dinkinesh ’s moons strange is that both lobe are about the same size ; The vast majority of contact binary star are lopsided . It ’s a bit of a secret as to how two equally - sized consistency would cling together gravitationally , according to NASA researchers . “It is puzzling , to say the least,“Hal Levison , an stargazer at the Southwest Research Institute and one of Lucy ’s principal investigators , said in astatement . " This is last to be fun for the scientific community of interests to figure out . "
— NASA flyby of " Dinky " asteroid reveals hidden moon
A diagram showing the trajectory of the NASA Lucy spacecraft (red) during its flyby of the asteroid Dinkinesh and its satellite (gray). “A” marks the location of the spacecraft at 12:55 p.m. EDT (1655 UTC) Nov. 1, 2023, and an inset shows the L’LORRI image captured at that time. “B” marks the spacecraft’s position a few minutes later at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 UTC), and the inset shows the corresponding L’LORRI view at that time.
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Dinkinesh is n’t even Lucy ’s primary goal — the asteroid flyby was sum to the investigation ’s schedule as a warm - up for its main mission , surveying Jupiter ’s Trojan asteroids for the first time . If all pass well , Lucy will reach these distant space rock-and-roll in 2027 . But this initial test indicates that Lucy ’s equipment is working even better than astronomers expected . The inquiry team now plans to have Lucy tear images of another primary swath asteroid , Donaldjohanson , as it zooms past in 2025 .
