NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is hurtling towards the tiny asteroid Dinkinesh

The Lucy spacecraft will visit its first of 10 asteroids on 1 November – a small rock called Dinkinesh that will be used to test the scientific instruments for its mission to the Trojan asteroids

By Leah Crane

31 October 2023

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NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is about to visit its first asteroid. On 1 November, it will pass within 430 kilometres of the small asteroid Dinkinesh, testing its instruments and taking a few scientific observations as it hurtles by.

Lucy launched in October 2021, and since then it has been flying at about 19.4 kilometres per second towards the outer solar system. Its main targets for exploration are the Trojan asteroids, which share Jupiter’s orbit around the sun. One clump of Trojans moves just ahead of Jupiter, while the other follows just behind it.

Dinkinesh is not a Trojan – rather, it is in the main asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. That makes it the perfect rock to stop by on the way to the Trojans to make sure that all of Lucy’s scientific instruments will be working properly for the other nine asteroids it will observe in the main part of its mission.

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Dinkinesh is less than 1 kilometre wide, small enough that it is barely visible from Earth, so this flyby will reveal its surface for the first time. During the flight, the tracking system used to keep the asteroid within the cameras’ field of vision will be tested – this system is particularly important because of asteroids’ relatively small size and the spacecraft’s extreme speed as it whips by.

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“For the Trojans, we have a very good estimation of the orbit, but there is still an uncertainty of about 100 miles, and when you approach these targets you don’t want to miss them,” says Noemí Pinilla-Alonso at the University of Central Florida. “This rehearsal is going to tell the team how good the system is, and it will give them an opportunity to test everything and to improve it before the science starts.”