Here you can find the Daily Telescope. A bit too much pseudoscience and not enough science; too much darkness and not enough light in this world. We’ll allow other magazines to provide you with a daily horoscope. We’re going to go in a different direction here at Ars Technica, drawing inspiration from actual photographs of a universe full of wonder and stars.
Greetings. We are indeed returning to the Lucy mission; it is November 8. There is yet more fantastic news to offer regarding NASA’s flyby of an asteroid last week.
A few days ago, the Daily Telescope announced that during the spacecraft’s flyby of the small main-belt asteroid Dinkinesh, the Lucy mission discovered not one, but two asteroids. As it happens, there was more to the tale. The smaller of the two asteroids is a contact binary, or two smaller asteroids in touch with one another, according to later data downlinked from the spacecraft.
To put it bluntly, scientists are quite excited.
According to John Spencer, deputy project scientist for Lucy at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, which has its headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, “contact binaries seem to be fairly common in the solar system.” “We’ve never observed one orbiting another asteroid, and we haven’t seen many up close. We had been wondering about strange fluctuations in Dinkinesh’s brightness that we noticed when we got closer, which suggested that Dinkinesh might have a moon of some kind, but we had never imagined something quite like this.”
Although Lucy is actually well beyond the Moon, you could claim that they are over the Moon. But next year, the spaceship is returning to Earth to receive a gravitational boost. After that flyby, the spacecraft will be propelled back into the main asteroid belt, where it will monitor Donaldjohanson in 2025 and go on to the Trojan asteroids in 2027, which are in Jupiter’s orbit.
