NASA’s Lucy spacecraft just sent home a formidable glimpse of the smallest asteroid goal on its 12-year agenda to review intriguing space rocks.
Asteroid Dinkinesh, a mere 0.5 mile-wide (1 kilometer-wide) rock residing within the inner a part of the most important asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, was captured by certainly one of Lucy’s high resolution cameras from a whopping 14 million miles (23 million km) away.
The photographs, snapped on Sept. 2 and Sept. 5, feature Dinkinesh as a speck of sunshine nearly lost amid countless similar spots if not for NASA circling it within the photos by NASA to help the attention.
“This is absolutely a tiny little asteroid,” Hal Levison, the principal investigator for the Lucy mission, had said in a statement earlier this yr. “A few of the team affectionately discuss with it as ‘Dinky.’ But, for a small asteroid, we expect it to be an enormous help for the Lucy mission.”
Launched in October 2021, the Lucy spacecraft is scheduled to go to the Trojan asteroids, a cloud of space rocks positioned between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. These shards are considered remnants of our ancient solar system from over 4 billion years ago. Dinkinesh, nevertheless, was added to Lucy’s agenda as a risk-mitigation exercise to check the efficiency of the spacecraft’s tracking system — specifically whether it could hold the rock in its field of view while gliding closer at speeds of 10,000 miles per hour (4.5 kilometers per second).
“Dinkinesh will remain an unresolved point of sunshine through the long approach and won’t start to indicate surface detail until the day of the encounter,” NASA representatives said in a statement.
Over the subsequent couple of months, an optical navigation program onboard Lucy will track Dinkinesh’s position with respect to a star-studded sky to guide the spacecraft for an accurate flyby. Finally, on Nov. 1, Lucy can be just 265 miles (425 km) from the space rock, scientists say.
The flyby on Nov. 1 can even be useful in assessing the accuracy with which Lucy can point at a goal, as certainly one of the spacecraft’s two solar arrays didn’t properly unfurl after its 2021 launch. Late last yr, the mission team estimated the array to be 98% deployed and suspended further efforts, noting it “carries an appropriate level of risk.”
“We’re not exactly sure, provided that the solar array will not be latched, of the pointing stability characteristics of the spacecraft, so this can even help us determine that,” Levinson said earlier this yr at a gathering about announcing Dinkinesh, based on SpaceNews.
The name Dinkinesh translates to “you might be marvelous” in Amharic — an official language in Ethiopia, where the three.2 million-year-old fossils of an early female ancestor nicknamed “Lucy” were discovered in 1974. Much like those fossils shedding light on human evolution, scientists think the Lucy spacecraft will illuminate early solar system history.