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By European Space Agency
ESA’s Hera asteroid mission has completed acoustic testing, confirming the spacecraft can withstand the sound of its own lift-off into orbit. Testing took place within the Agency’s Large European Acoustic Facility at the ESTEC Test Centre in the Netherlands. This is Europe’s largest and most powerful sound system, fitted with a quartet of noise horns that can generate more than 154 decibels of extreme noise.
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By NASA
4 min read
NASA’s Lucy Surprises Again, Observes 1st-ever Contact Binary Orbiting Asteroid
It turns out there is more to the “marvelous” asteroid Dinkinesh and its newly discovered satellite than first meets the eye. As NASA’s Lucy spacecraft continued to return data of its first asteroid encounter on Nov. 1, 2023, the team was surprised to discover that Dinkinesh’s unanticipated satellite is, itself, a contact binary – that is, it is made of two smaller objects touching each other.
This image shows the asteroid Dinkinesh and its satellite as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) as NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft departed the system. This image was taken at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 UTC) Nov. 1, 2023, about 6 minutes after closest approach, from a range of approximately 1,010 miles (1,630 km). From this perspective, the satellite is revealed to be a contact binary, the first time a contact binary has been seen orbiting another asteroid. NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL In the first downlinked images of Dinkinesh and its satellite, which were taken at closest approach, the two lobes of the contact binary happened to lie one behind the other from Lucy’s point of view. Only when the team downlinked additional images, captured in the minutes around the encounter, was the true nature of this object revealed.
“Contact binaries seem to be fairly common in the solar system,” said John Spencer, Lucy deputy project scientist, of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of the San-Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute. “We haven’t seen many up-close, and we’ve never seen one orbiting another asteroid. We’d been puzzling over odd variations in Dinkinesh’s brightness that we saw on approach, which gave us a hint that Dinkinesh might have a moon of some sort, but we never suspected anything so bizarre!”
Lucy’s primary goal is to survey the never-before-visited Jupiter Trojan asteroids. This first encounter with a small, main belt asteroid was only added to the mission in January 2023, primarily to serve as an in-flight test of the system that allows the spacecraft to continually track and image its asteroid targets as it flies past at high speed. The excellent performance of that system at Dinkinesh allowed the team to capture multiple perspectives on the system, which enabled the team to better understand the asteroids’ shapes and make this unexpected discovery.
“It is puzzling, to say the least,” said Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy, also from Southwest Research Institute. “I would have never expected a system that looks like this. In particular, I don’t understand why the two components of the satellite have similar sizes. This is going to be fun for the scientific community to figure out.”
This second image was taken about 6 minutes after closest approach from a distance of approximately 1,010 miles (1,630 km). The spacecraft traveled around 960 miles (1,500 km) between the two released images.
“It’s truly marvelous when nature surprises us with a new puzzle,” said Tom Statler, Lucy program scientist from NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Great science pushes us to ask questions that we never knew we needed to ask.”
A diagram showing the trajectory of the NASA Lucy spacecraft (red) during its flyby of the asteroid Dinkinesh and its satellite (gray). “A” marks the location of the spacecraft at 12:55 p.m. EDT (1655 UTC) Nov. 1, 2023, and an inset shows the L’LORRI image captured at that time. “B” marks the spacecraft’s position a few minutes later at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 UTC), and the inset shows the corresponding L’LORRI view at that time. Overall graphic, NASA/Goddard/SwRI; Inset “A,” NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab); Inset “B,” NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL The team is continuing to downlink and process the remainder of the encounter data from the spacecraft. Dinkinesh and its satellite are the first two of 11 asteroids that Lucy plans to explore over its 12-year journey. After skimming the inner edge of the main asteroid belt, Lucy is now heading back toward Earth for a gravity assist in December 2024. That close flyby will propel the spacecraft back through the main asteroid belt, where it will observe asteroid Donaldjohanson in 2025, and then on to the Trojan asteroids in 2027.
Lucy’s principal investigator is based out of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of Southwest Research Institute, headquartered in San Antonio. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built and operates the spacecraft. Lucy is the 13th mission in NASA’s Discovery Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
For more information about NASA’s Lucy mission, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/lucy
By Katherine Kretke
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
Media Contact:
Nancy N. Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Nov 07, 2023 Editor Jamie Adkins Location Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Asteroids Goddard Space Flight Center Lucy The Solar System Explore More
3 min read NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Captures its 1st Images of Asteroid Dinkinesh
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured its first images with a view of the main belt asteroid…
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2 months ago
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By NASA
3 min read
NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Discovers 2nd Asteroid During Dinkinesh Flyby
On Nov. 1, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft flew by not just its first asteroid, but its first two. The first images returned by Lucy reveal that the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh is actually a binary pair.
This image shows the “moonrise” of the satellite as it emerges from behind asteroid Dinkinesh as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI), one of the most detailed images returned by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its flyby of the asteroid binary. This image was taken at 12:55 p.m. EDT (1655 UTC) Nov. 1, 2023, within a minute of closest approach, from a range of approximately 270 miles (430 km). From this perspective, the satellite is behind the primary asteroid. The image has been sharpened and processed to enhance contrast.NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOAO “Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” said Hal Levison, referring to the meaning of Dinkinesh in the Amharic language, “marvelous.” Levison is principal investigator for Lucy from the Boulder, Colorado, branch of the San-Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute. “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.”
In the weeks prior to the spacecraft’s encounter with Dinkinesh, the Lucy team had wondered if Dinkinesh might be a binary system, given how Lucy’s instruments were seeing the asteroid’s 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.
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.
A series of images of the binary asteroid pair, Dinkinesh, as seen by the terminal tracking camera (T2CAM) on NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its closest approach on Nov. 1, 2023. The images were taken 13 seconds apart. The apparent motion of the two asteroids is due to the motion of the spacecraft as it flew past at 10,000 mph (4.5 km/s). These images have been sharpened and processed to enhance contrast.NASA/Goddard/SwRI/ASU “This is an awesome series of images. They indicate that the terminal tracking system worked as intended, even when the universe presented us with a more difficult target than we expected,” said Tom Kennedy, guidance and navigation engineer at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado. “It’s one thing to simulate, test, and practice. It’s another thing entirely to see it actually happen.”
While this encounter was carried out as an engineering test, the team’s scientists are excitedly poring over the data to glean insights into the nature of small asteroids.
“We knew this was going to be the smallest main belt asteroid ever seen up close,” said Keith Noll, Lucy project scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The fact that it is two makes it even more exciting. In some ways these asteroids look similar to the near-Earth asteroid binary Didymos and Dimorphos that DART saw, but there are some really interesting differences that we will be investigating.”
It will take up to a week for the team to downlink the remainder of the encounter data from the spacecraft. The team will use this data to evaluate the spacecraft’s behavior during the encounter and to prepare for the next close-up look at an asteroid, the main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, in 2025. Lucy will then be well-prepared to encounter the mission’s main targets, the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, starting in 2027.
By Katherine Kretke
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
Media contact: Nancy N. Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Nov 02, 2023 Editor Jamie Adkins Contact Related Terms
Asteroids Goddard Space Flight Center Lucy The Solar System Explore More
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