BONUS!: Testing A "Photo Shoot" Cam, NASA/SWRI's Lucy Captures First Ever "Contact Binary" Orbiting An Asteroid -- At Dinkinesh...

This is a truly fortuitous discovery -- and what comes of deciding to "test" one's equipment, in advance of the actual main science mission. Lucy whizzed by a small object called Dinkinesh on the inner edge of the asteriod belt last week (as we mentioned) -- to test its high speed cameras. The craft had detected oscillating brightness with long range cams, as it sped toward the asteroid, and so a satellite was posited.

But no one expected to see two small rocky world-lettes, essentially grinding against one another, and being held in a tight orbit around Dinkinesh. Here it all is, at right -- and the story below, from Boulder's SWRI and NASA:

. . .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. . . .

Now you know. Lucy will now loop back toward Earth for a gravity assist speed boost -- then back out to the center of the Jovian "Trojan" asteroid belt, to capture perhaps several, if not dozens, of larger objects -- and beam the data back to us -- in about three years. Onward, but a great bit of bonus deep space science!

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