You could call it a “mini moon”.
In one of the smallest, but still exciting, discoveries by Nasa in recent years, a spacecraft visiting a minor asteroid way out in the solar system has discovered that the chunk of space rock has its own tiny sidekick.
The spacecraft, called Lucy, was visiting asteroid Dinkinesh when it made the unexpected find of a moon companion.
The discovery was made during Wednesday’s flyby of Dinkinesh, 300m miles away in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. The spacecraft snapped a picture of the pair when it was about 270 miles out.
In data and images beamed back to Earth, the spacecraft confirmed that Dinkinesh is barely a half-mile (790 meters) across. Its closely circling moon is a mere one-tenth of a mile (220 meters) in size.
Nasa sent Lucy past Dinkinesh as a rehearsal for visiting the bigger, more mysterious asteroids out near Jupiter.
Launched in 2021, the spacecraft will reach the first of these so-called Trojan asteroids in 2027 and explore them for at least six years. The original target list of seven asteroids now stands at 11.
Dinkinesh means “you are marvelous” in Ethiopia’s Amharic language.
“Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” Hal Levison, the lead scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
