In September 2022, a NASA spacecraft smashed into a tiny asteroid to nudge it off its orbital course.
The first look at the Dinkinesh asteroid revealed a surprise: The small space rock had its own moon. Now as the Lucy spacecraft downlinked more images of its first target, it showed not one but two tiny asteroids orbiting around Dinkinesh.
The Lucy spacecraft is on a 12-year journey to visit eight different asteroids, and it’s almost caught up with the first space rock on its checklist.
After the successful impact of NASA’s DART mission on the Dimorphos asteroid, scientists have encountered a series of unexpected outcomes, the latest being the unanticipated lengthening of the asteroid’s orbital period around its larger partner, Didymos.
The Lucy spacecraft is getting closer to its first asteroid encounter, a small, stony celestial body that was recently added to the mission’s itinerary.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have detected nearly 40 boulders near Dimorphos—the target of NASA’s wildly successful DART experiment to deflect a non-threatening asteroid. This isn’t exactly positive news, since it suggests that hitting a bona fide hazardous asteroid might create a cluster of possibly…