Strange moon of asteroid Dinkinesh is weirder than thought after NASA probe finds 'contact binary' (photo)

Three grey space rocks in the blackness of space. the largest is alone on the left; the smaller two are on the right, touching one another.

Asteroid Dinkinesh continues to surprise us.

On Nov. 1, NASA's Lucy spacecraft zoomed past this space rock, marking the first of several asteroid encounters the probe is designed to make. Lucy's goal is to ultimately explore a set of asteroids near Jupiter, known as the Trojans, which are thought to hold clues about the earliest days of our solar system; these objects may be able to shed light on the origins of life on Earth. But, on the way to those Trojans, Lucy has a couple of stops — including Dinkinesh, which sits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.