NASA Asteroid Discoveries

[Yazata]

NASA's Lucy spaceprobe just conducted a flyby on November 1 of an asteroid called Dinkinesh. And it was full of surprises!

First surprise was that Dinkinesh has a tiny moon orbiting around it. That wasn't known until Lucy got there.

Second surprise is that the moon is what astronomers call a "contact binary", basically two tiny objects pulled together by their miniscule gravity over billions of years, but with not enough force to physically merge them.

Something else I noticed is that Dinkinesh and its weird double moon look like solid rocks, not piles of space gravel like Bennu. There seems to be more variety in asteroid morphology than previously anticipated, which will give the astronomers who specialize in asteroids new things to think about.

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/lucy/n...-asteroid/

[Image: F-WlmlAWQAAkyov?format=png&name=small]