Even before its launch in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy mission was already on course to break records by visiting more asteroids than any previous mission. Now, the mission can add one more asteroid to the list, after a surprise result from a long-running observation campaign. Lucy’s science team di
We were thrilled that 14 teams reported observing the star blink out as it passed behind the asteroid. However, as we analyzed the data, we saw that two of the observations were not like the others,” said Marc Buie, Lucy occultation science lead at the Southwest Research Institute, which is headquartered in San Antonio. “Those two observers detected an object around 200 km away from Polymele. It had to be a satellite.
Using the occultation data, the scientists determined that this satellite is roughly 3 miles in diameter, orbiting Polymele, which is itself around 17 miles along its widest axis. The observed distance between the two bodies was approximately 125 miles .
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