The small important belt asteroid (152830) Dinkenish was lately added to NASA’s Lucy mission and can be its first flyby goal on November 1, 2023.
This picture of the primary belt of the Dinkenish asteroid was taken by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft on September 5, 2023. The brightest star on this discipline of view is HD 34258, a 7.6-magnitude star within the constellation Auriga that’s too faint to be seen with the bare eye. the earth. At this distance, Dinkenish’s magnitude is barely 19 magnitudes, about 150,000 occasions weaker than that star. Picture supply: NASA Goddard House Flight Middle/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL.
Dinkenishoften known as 1999 VD57, is a rocky belt asteroid about 900 meters (3,000 ft) in diameter.
He was Discover by Lincoln Center for Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) Survey November 4, 1999.
Dinkenish orbits with a interval of 52.67 hours and varies in brightness with a lightcurve amplitude of 0.39 magnitude, indicating that it has an elongated form.
It’s the first of 10 asteroids that NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will go to on its 12-year expedition.
The asteroid has been designated as a flyby goal for the mission in January 2023, which is able to strategy inside 450 kilometers (280 miles) of the asteroid on November 1, 2023.
Lucy took her first photographs of Dinkenish whereas it was 23 million kilometers (14 million miles) from the asteroid.
Suggestions was supplied by Lucy for long-range reconnaissance photography (L’LORRI) Excessive-resolution digital camera on board the ship Lucy.
Over the following two months, the spacecraft will proceed towards the asteroid till its closest strategy, which is 425 kilometers (265 miles).
The Lucy staff will use this encounter as a chance to check the spacecraft’s methods and procedures, specializing in the spacecraft’s terminal monitoring system, designed to maintain Denkenish throughout the devices’ fields of view whereas the spacecraft flies at 4.5 km/s (10,000 mph). ).
Lucy will proceed to picture the asteroid over the approaching months as a part of its optical navigation program, which makes use of the asteroid’s obvious place in opposition to the star’s background to find out the relative place of Lucy and Dinkenish to make sure an correct flyby.
Dinkinesh will stay an unresolved level of sunshine in the course of the lengthy strategy and won’t start to point out floor element till encounter day.
