The small asteroid visited by NASA's Lucy spacecraft this week has brought a significant surprise for scientists. It turned out that the asteroid, named Dinkinesh, has a companion: a small moon. This discovery was made during a flyby on Wednesday near Dinkinesh, located about 480 million kilometers in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. The spacecraft captured images of the two asteroids while being approximately 435 kilometers away.
In the data and images sent back to Earth, the spacecraft confirmed that Dinkinesh has a diameter of no more than 790 meters, and the moon closely orbiting it is 220 meters in size. NASA sent the Lucy spacecraft to Dinkinesh as a training mission for exploring larger, more mysterious asteroids near Jupiter.
Lucy is expected to reach its first so-called Trojan asteroids by 2027 and will study 11 of them for at least six years. Notably, "Dinkinesh" means "you are marvelous" in Amharic, the language of Ethiopia. It is also the Amharic name for Lucy, a 3.2 million-year-old human ancestor fossil discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s, after which the spacecraft was named.
Hal Levinson, a senior scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, stated, "Dinkinesh has already lived up to its name. This is amazing."
