Why in the News?

Recently NASA's Lucy mission has discovered that the asteroid Dinkinesh is actually a binary system of two asteroids.

About Lucy Mission:

• The Lucy Mission is a NASA space probe designed to explore the Trojan asteroids.
• These are the asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter around the Sun.
• It's on a twelve-year journey to visit eight different asteroids and the entire mission costs around $981 million.
• It was launched on October 16, 2021, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station or Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
• The Lucy Mission is named for the fossilized skeleton of a human ancestor, which was named for the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."
• The mission's scientists hope that Lucy will help them to better understand our own origins, just as the Lucy fossil helped us to better understand our evolutionary history.
• The Lucy spacecraft is equipped with a suite of instruments that will be used to study the asteroids it encounters. These instruments include:
• A high-resolution visible camera
• A near-infrared spectrometer
• A thermal emission spectrometer
• A dust detector
• A radio occultation instrument
• Lucy's mission will provide new insights into the diversity of the Trojan asteroids, their formation, and their role in the early solar system.
• The mission will also test new technologies for deep space exploration, such as a solar-powered propulsion system and a terminal tracking system.
• It made its first gravity assist from Earth on October 16, 2022, and on November 1, 2023, it flew by its first asteroid, Dinkinesh, a binary asteroid in the main belt.
• Lucy will make another gravity assist from Earth in 2024, and in 2025, it will fly by the inner main-belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson.