The Lucy spacecraft, which NASA launched on Oct. 16, 2021 and is bound for Jupiter, encountered its first asteroid, which turned out to be two asteroids orbiting each other, on Nov. 1 as it was conducting testing of its tracking systems.
The asteroid, called “Dinkinesh” (which means “you are marvelous” in the Amharic language—the major language in Ethiopia) is about 480 million km from Earth, and is one of 11 asteroids which Lucy will investigate. Scientists believed that Dinkinesh (nicknamed “Dinky") might be a binary system, due to its fluctuations in its brightness.
Now, with the most recent data, two can now be discerned clearly, with one being much smaller than the other. 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.
