{"id":100694,"date":"2020-01-11T01:46:53","date_gmt":"2020-01-11T09:46:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/nasas-lucy-mission-confirms-discovery-of-eurybates-satellite"},"modified":"2020-01-11T01:46:53","modified_gmt":"2020-01-11T09:46:53","slug":"nasas-lucy-mission-confirms-discovery-of-eurybates-satellite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/01\/nasas-lucy-mission-confirms-discovery-of-eurybates-satellite","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s Lucy Mission Confirms Discovery of Eurybates Satellite"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nasas-lucy-mission-confirms-discovery-of-eurybates-satellite2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>NASA\u2019s Lucy mission team is seeing double after discovering that Eurybates, the asteroid the spacecraft has targeted for flyby in 2027, has a small satellite. This \u201cbonus\u201d science exploration opportunity for the project was discovered using images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope\u2019s Wide Field Camera 3 in September 2018, December 2019, and January 2020.<\/p>\n<p>Launching in October 2021, Lucy will be the first space mission to study the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/sites\/default\/files\/thumbnails\/image\/trojans_nolabels.gif\">Trojan asteroids<\/a>, a population of small bodies orbiting the Sun \u201cleading\u201d and \u201ctrailing\u201d Jupiter, at the same distance from the Sun as the gas giant. With flyby encounters past seven different asteroids \u2013 one in the Main Asteroid Belt and six in the Trojans, Lucy will be the first space mission in history to explore so many different destinations in independent orbits around our Sun.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis newly discovered satellite is more than 6,000 times fainter than Eurybates, implying a diameter less than 1 km,\u201d said Southwest Research Institute\u2019s Hal Levison, principal investigator of the mission. \u201cIf this estimate proves to be correct, it will be among the smallest asteroids visited.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NASA\u2019s Lucy mission team is seeing double after discovering that Eurybates, the asteroid the spacecraft has targeted for flyby in 2027, has a small satellite. This \u201cbonus\u201d science exploration opportunity for the project was discovered using images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope\u2019s Wide Field Camera 3 in September 2018, December 2019, and January 2020. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-satellites"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100694\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}