The tiny dot moving against a background of stars is the first image of main belt asteroid Dinkinesh from NASA’s Lucy spacecraft; It is the first of 10 asteroids the spacecraft will visit during its 12-year exploration journey. Lucy took these two photos on September 2 and 5, 2023. On the left, the image flashes between the first two images of Dinkinesh. On the right, the asteroid is circled for convenience.

Lucy took these images while she was 14 million miles (23 million km) away from the asteroid, which is only 1 km wide. Over the next two months, Lucy will continue moving towards Dinkinesh until it approaches a maximum of 265 miles (425 km) on November 1, 2023.

The Lucy team will use this encounter as an opportunity to test the spacecraft’s systems and procedures, focusing on the spacecraft’s terminal tracking system, which is designed to keep the asteroid in the instruments’ field of view while flying at 10,000 miles per hour (4.5 km/h). ).

Over the coming months, Lucy will continue to image the asteroid as part of its optical navigation program to provide a precise flyby by determining the relative position of Lucy and Dinkinesh using the asteroid’s apparent position against the star. Dinkinesh will remain an unresolved point of light during the long approach and will not begin to show surface details until the day of impact.

The brightest star in this field of view is HD 34258, a magnitude 7.6 star in the constellation Auriga that is too faint to be seen with the naked eye from Earth. At this distance Dinkinesh is only magnitude 19, about 150,000 times fainter than that star. Celestial north is to the right of the frame, which is approximately 74,500 miles (120,000 km) wide.

The observations were made with Lucy’s high-resolution camera, the L’LORRI instrument (short for Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager), provided by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Source