NASA's Lucy Mission Discovers Asteroid Dinkinesh Is a Binary Pair with Tiny Moonlet

NASA’s Lucy mission reveals surprising 'binary pair' status of asteroid Dinkinesh during its flyby, as it discovers a smaller 720-foot space-rock companion orbiting the larger asteroid.

NASA's Lucy spacecraft discovered that the asteroid Dinkinesh, originally thought to be singular, is actually a binary pair with a smaller 720-foot space-rock companion.
The discovery was made during the spacecraft's flyby of Dinkinesh on November 1, 2023. The flyby served as a dress rehearsal for Lucy’s primary mission, a series of flybys of strange “Trojan” asteroids orbiting the sun ahead of and behind Jupiter.
Researchers had suspected Dinkinesh may be a binary system due to fluctuations in the asteroid's brightness during the approach. The binary nature of Dinkinesh confirmed these suspicions.
The finding adds to the understanding of main-belt asteroids, which are believed to eventually migrate deeper into the solar system to orbit the sun at about the same distance as Earth.
Lucy is expected to conduct more asteroid flybys including a close encounter with another main belt asteroid called Donaldjohanson in 2025, before it begins exploring Jupiter's Trojan asteroids in 2027.