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Two for the price of one! NASA has just made a shocking revelation. NASA’s Lucy mission, designed to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids which recently flew close by Asteroid Dinkinesh, revealed some surprising results. This Trojan asteroid had a huge secret that was finally exposed. The Lucy Mission spacecraft took images that found that the asteroid Dinkinesh is not just one asteroid. In fact, it is a binary pair floating in the orbit of Jupiter. Know more about the astonishing Asteroid Dinkinesh discovery here.
Asteroid Dinkinesh
According to a report published by NASA, scientists earlier speculated that the asteroid Dinkinesh was a binary pair, now the images revealed by the Lucy spacecraft instruments confirm the claims. The study based on preliminary analysis of the available images said that the asteroid is a close binary and the estimated sizes of the objects are approximately 790 meters and 220 meters. Hal Levison, principal investigator for the Lucy mission said that the asteroid Dinkinesh matches its meaning of “marvellous” and added, “When Lucy was originally selected for flight, we planned to fly by seven asteroids. With the addition of Dinkinesh, two Trojan moons, and now this satellite, we’ve turned it up to 11.”
NASA reported that the discovery was part of an in-flight engineering test of the spacecraft and the two asteroid encounter was something that has excited the researchers even more. These binary pairs in scientific terms are called “Trojan swarms”. They are the remnants leftovers that orbit around the Sun and Jupiter.
After Dinkinesh asteroid, NASA’s Lucy mission will explore nine more such space rocks to gain in-depth knowledge of the celestial objects.
About Lucy mission
NASA reports that the Lucy spacecraft was launched on October 16, 2021, to explore a record-breaking number of asteroids which include Trojan asteroids that share an orbit around the Sun with Jupiter and fly by two asteroids in the solar system’s main asteroid belt. It is a 12 year mission that will explore and give scientists amazing facts about asteroids. The name of the mission was given after a skeleton was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia. The skeleton gave scientists a brief understanding of human evolution.
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