NASA's Lucy asteroid-hopping spacecraft pins down ages of 1st asteroid targets

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Sharmila Kuthunur is a Seattle-based science journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics and space exploration. Follow her on X @skuthunur.

This image shows the asteroid Dinkinesh and its satellite as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager as NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft departed the system. From this perspective, the satellite is revealed to be a contact binary, the first time a contact binary has been seen orbiting another asteroid.flew past its first official asteroid target named Dinkinesh, it found the space rock was not one, not two butrocks huddled together.

Earlier this month, Spencer, Levison and other mission members shared with scientists preliminary results from that fortuitous encounter, which resulted in a wealth of data. Speaking at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas, they said Dinkinesh and Selam appear to be roughly the same age, have similar ridges on their equators — suggesting mass shedding and re-accretion — and are mildly battered with impacts that left behind detectable craters.

"This could tell us something fundamental about the formation of these objects and possibly different processes are responsible for Dinkinesh and Selam," said Marchi.

 

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