What Does An Asteroid Hide? NASA’s Probe Lucy Reveals a Surprise
Dinkinesh, which may be seen orbiting between our planetary neighbors, Mars and Jupiter, is not the only object of its kind in that part of the cosmos. Astonishing discoveries have been made possible by the Lucy asteroid probe operated by NASA, and the recent one is remarkable@ Although we are aware of a number of asteroids that are part of binary, trinary, as well as one quaternary bound groups in the Solar System, the actual number of asteroids that are part of these bound groups is unknown. But now, an item that appears to have been made from space pebbles that were squashed together was even spotted by scientists, thanks to Lucy.
Take a look below at what Lucy captured:
Dinkinesh and its enigmatic moonlet differ in some interesting ways from the similarly sized near-Earth asteroids that have been seen by spacecraft like OSIRIS-REx and DART, explained Simone Marchi, a planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).
In the weeks leading up to Lucy’s closest approach to Dinkinesh, astronomers started to have an intuition that the asteroid could have a moon as an outcome of the most recent discovery. The object’s brightness continued fluctuating; this is typically a hint that there is a second object that adds to and subtracts from the entire light mirrored by the asteroid as the binary circles around the sun. The early measurements imply that the enormous rock has a width of around 790 meters at its broadest point, whereas the width of the smaller rock is only about 220 meters. Impressive!
It is believed that asteroids, especially those that reside in Jovian orbit, are made of the same materials that were used to construct the celestial bodies at the very beginning of the Solar System and that these materials are now in a largely unaltered state. The process of retrieving the remaining Dinkinesh information from Lucy is going to need a little bit more time than originally anticipated. Not only will this provide information on the asteroid, but it will also provide details about how Lucy is functioning.
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