Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light; a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.<\/p>\n
Good morning. It is November 8, and yes, we\u2019re headed back out to the Lucy mission again. NASA has shared some additional information about an asteroid flyby last week, and there\u2019s more goodness to share.<\/p>\n
A few days ago, the Daily Telescope reported that the Lucy spacecraft had found not one but two asteroids during its flyby of the small main-belt asteroid Dinkinesh. It turns out that was not the whole story. Subsequent data downlinked from the spacecraft revealed that the smaller of the two asteroids is a contact binary\u2014two smaller asteroids in contact with one another.<\/p>\n
Scientists are, to put it mildly, pretty excited.<\/p>\n
\u201cContact binaries seem to be fairly common in the solar system,\u201d said John Spencer, Lucy deputy project scientist, of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of the San-Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute. \u201cWe haven\u2019t seen many up close, and we\u2019ve never seen one orbiting another asteroid. We\u2019d been puzzling over odd variations in Dinkinesh\u2019s 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!\u201d<\/p>\n
You could say they are over the Moon, but in truth, Lucy is far beyond the Moon. However, the spacecraft is heading back toward Earth for a gravity assist next year. That flyby will propel the spacecraft back through the main asteroid belt, where it will observe asteroid Donaldjohanson in 2025 and then on to the Trojan asteroids in Jupiter\u2019s orbit in 2027.<\/p>\n
Source: NASA.<\/p>\n
Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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