Lucy, Discovery Mission 13 - a grand tour of the Jupiter Trojans Options

[jasedm]

Nice animation of the gyrations of Lucy to keep the instruments pointed at asteroid Dinkinesh.

Dinkinesh encounter animation

Seems counter-intuitive to see the spacecraft pivot around the camera platform like that, but wow! Thanks for the link Kenny.

[Marcin600]

https://blogs.nasa.gov/lucy/?fbclid=IwAR08J...9NvWR23oF6tUvP4
quote: "The Lucy operations team has confirmed that the NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has phoned home after its encounter with the small main belt asteroid, Dinkinesh. Based on the information received, the team has determined that the spacecraft is in good health and the team has commanded the spacecraft to start downlinking the data collected during the encounter. It will take up to a week for all the data collected during the encounter to be downlinked to Earth. The team is looking forward to see how the spacecraft performed during this first in-flight test of a high-speed asteroid encounter."

[jasedm]

Can't wait to see the results - good luck to the team!"

[stevesliva]

Googling for information, whether there is a press conference scheduled, etc... found this article about sifting through WISE data to do a study:
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/lucy/data-fro...roid-dinkinesh/
... small enough to be detectable, but not detected, per se. Will be interesting to see if these images are novel or not. It's such a small object...

[john_s]

Closeup Dinkinesh images (with a surprise!)

John

[nprev]

Amazing! How cool is that? Gotta love serendipity; it's the "s" in science!

L'LORRI sure seems to perform quite well, and of course the entire integrated autonomous targeting process obviously did too. Nice win for the team.

[jasedm]

Fabulous! Wonderful stuff. Another unique little world(s)

The terminal tracking system seems to be more than capable of dealing with 'distractions'

[stevesliva]

Closeup Dinkinesh images (with a surprise!)

Nice!

Dinkinesh is about 1/2 the size of Dactyl so even taking moons into account, it is indeed setting records for Dinki...ness.

[kenny]

Fabulous and amazing result...!

And it does look like Dinkinesh might have an equatorial bulge like both Bennu and Ryugu ...
(assuming that the spin axis is vertical in the new photo.)

[Explorer1]

Lucy is having quite the ride multiplying asteroids! At this rate, I don't know what to expect at the trojans! Interesting how the satellite evaded prior observation, (presumably it would be visible via an occultation, but none happened, did they?)
Definitely a curious shape on the moon, seems like another giant boulder on its southern hemisphere (and an equatorial ridge, perhaps?)
And presumably we can get a mass measurement too....

[Bjorn Jonsson]

This is amazing. I wasn't expecting anything really unexpected from this flyby so this is a very nice surprise.

[stfletch]

What a cool surprise!

Is this the first time we've discovered a moon of an asteroid only during the flyby since Ida and Dactyl?

[Phil Stooke]

Yes, that's right. Lots of other binaries have been detected using earth-based radar and telescopes but this and Ida/Dactyl are the only two discovered in the flyby data.

Phil

[mcaplinger]

The terminal tracking system seems to be more than capable of dealing with 'distractions'

One of the primary Lucy targets (617 Patroclus) is a binary so this always had to be considered. But for this flyby distance and target size I doubt it mattered much.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/2022000...d%20Mission.pdf for more details.

[Phil Stooke]

"And presumably we can get a mass measurement too.... "

We might get a mass estimate if the moon's orbit can be determined reasonably well, but that could be very difficult given the rapid flyby. The spacecraft trajectory is not going to be altered by this small object so the moon's orbit is the only hope.