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NASA's "asteroid" probe Lucy discovers a huge surprise when she completes her first flyby asteroid target.The asteroid dinkinesh, which orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, is not alone. It turns out that this gray space rock has its own miniature asteroid moon, which orbits so close that it is too close to be seen from a great distance.
This discovery suggests that there may be a lot more double asteroids than we thought, and it can help us understand how rocks are in the solar system"Growth".and interactions.
Simone Marchi, a planetary scientist at the Southwestern Research Institute (SWRI), is excited"We saw a lot of asteroids up close and thought it would be hard to surprise us anymore
"Well, that's clearly 'wrong'. Dinkinesh and its mysterious companion differ in some interesting ways from similarly sized near-Earth asteroids discovered by spacecraft such as Osiris-Rex and DART. ”
We know that there are many bisystemic, trilineary, and even quadruple asteroids around the solar system, but it is not clear exactly how many of them areexistsin these connected asteroid clusters. We even saw an object that appeared to be formed by the fusion of space rocks.
Asteroids do tendGather together- Of course, there are the main belts that share Jupiter's orbit andTroyAsteroid swarms – but it's unclear how often they end up close enough to each other to be gravitationally bound.
As Lucy approached the asteroid, scientists began to suspect that Dinkish might have a moon in a matter of weeks. The brightness of the object is constantly changing; This usually indicates that the second object appears and disappears in a double orbit, contributing or decreasing to the total light reflected by the asteroid.
When Lucy finally got close enough to shoot in detail**, her suspicions were confirmed. As Lucy flies by at 16,100 kilometers (10,000 miles) per hour, she clearly spots two objects dancing in close orbits.
Preliminary measurements indicate that the larger rock is about 790 m (2,600 ft) wide at its widest point, while the smaller rock is relatively challenging, at 220 m (720 ft) wide.
Keith Knoll, a planetary astronomer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said"We know this will be the smallest main-belt asteroid to date to be observed up close. ”But in fact, there are two people who are even more exciting. In some ways, these asteroids are similar to the near-Earth binary asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos seen by Dart, but we'll explore some very interesting differences. ”
Asteroids, especially those orbiting Jupiter, are thought to be made up of material that made up planets in the early days of the solar system and are in a relatively primitive state.
Lucy'sThe mission is to study these asteroids to learn more about how the solar system is formed and how the planets are formed. During its 12-year mission, it will test two main-belt asteroids and nineTrojan asteroid.
Since at least some of the planets, the rocky worlds of the inner solar system, are thought to be formed by smaller rocks clumping together and colliding with each other, discovering more binary star systems like Dinkish can help us better understand how things work. 。
It takes longer to get fromLucy's placeGet the rest of the data for Dinkinesh. This will give us information not only about the asteroid, but also about itLucyInformation on how it works.
At the same time, the spacecraft is on track for a second main-belt encounter, the Donald Johnson asteroidRendezvous, which will happen as early as 2025.
Scientific rambling