{"id":175937,"date":"2023-11-13T04:28:07","date_gmt":"2023-11-13T10:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/nasas-lucy-spacecraft-discovers-2nd-asteroid-during-dinkinesh-flyby"},"modified":"2023-11-13T04:28:07","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T10:28:07","slug":"nasas-lucy-spacecraft-discovers-2nd-asteroid-during-dinkinesh-flyby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/nasas-lucy-spacecraft-discovers-2nd-asteroid-during-dinkinesh-flyby","title":{"rendered":"NASA\u2019s Lucy Spacecraft Discovers 2nd Asteroid During Dinkinesh Flyby"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nasas-lucy-spacecraft-discovers-2nd-asteroid-during-dinkinesh-flyby.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cDinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,\u201d said Hal Levison, referring to the meaning of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/solar-system\/nasas-lucy-asteroid-target-gets-a-name\/\">Dinkinesh<\/a> in the Amharic language, \u201cmarvelous.\u201d Levison is principal investigator for Lucy from the Boulder, Colorado, branch of the San-Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute. \u201cWhen Lucy was originally selected for flight, we planned to fly by seven asteroids. With the addition of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/solar-system\/nasas-lucy-team-announces-new-asteroid-target\/\">Dinkinesh<\/a>, two <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/missions\/lucy\/nasas-lucy-mission-confirms-discovery-of-eurybates-satellite\/\">Trojan<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/centers-and-facilities\/goddard\/nasas-lucy-team-discovers-moon-around-asteroid-polymele\/\">moons<\/a>, and now this satellite, we\u2019ve turned it up to 11.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the weeks prior to the spacecraft\u2019s encounter with Dinkinesh, the Lucy team had wondered if Dinkinesh might be a binary system, given how Lucy\u2019s instruments were seeing the asteroid\u2019s brightness changing with time. The first images from the encounter removed all doubt. Dinkinesh is a close binary. From a preliminary analysis of the first available images, the team estimates that the larger body is approximately 0.5 miles (790 m) at its widest, while the smaller is about 0.15 miles (220 m) in size.<\/p>\n<p>This encounter primarily served as an in-flight test of the spacecraft, specifically focusing on testing the system that allows Lucy to autonomously track an asteroid as it flies past at 10,000 mph, referred to as the terminal tracking system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cDinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,\u201d said Hal Levison, referring to the meaning of Dinkinesh in the Amharic language, \u201cmarvelous.\u201d Levison is principal investigator for Lucy from the Boulder, Colorado, branch of the San-Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute. \u201cWhen Lucy was originally selected for flight, we planned to fly by seven [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175937","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175937\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}