Lucy spots Dinkinesh, NASA eclipse science, My homecoming
Lucy spots Dinkinesh, NASA eclipse science, My homecoming
A space mission sees its first asteroidal target, I’m moderating a NASA panel about the upcoming eclipses, and we’re finally moving into our new home in Virginia.
September 14, 2023 Issue #617
Shameless Self-Promotion
Where I’ll be doing things you can watch and listen to or read about
On Tuesday September 19 at 23:00 UTC (19:00 Eastern US time) I will be moderating a panel of five experts talking about real science you can do during the two upcoming solar eclipses in October and April! These are “citizen science” projects that will use real data taken by anyone who can participate, and they include measuring the size of the Sun, watching for environmental changes during totality, mapping the Sun’s outer atmosphere, and more.
This panel is sponsored by my friends at SciStarter and at NASA, and will be live streamed. You can register here to listen in (and ask questions, too). This will be fun and very interesting, and if you decide to join in on the research you will be doing real science that will help astronomers better understand the Sun and the way eclipses affect us on Earth. Pretty cool, right? So please come join us!
Pic o’ the Letter
A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a description so you can grok it
Regular BANners know that I have a particular fondness for the Lucy mission, a spacecraft on its way to Jupiter’s orbit to fly by quite a few asteroids that share the giant planet’s path around the Sun. I wrote about it on The Old Blog many times, as well as here on the BAN.
Although it won’t reach Jupiter’s orbit for quite some time, it will pass by its first asteroid on November 1 of this year. That wee rock, called Dinkinesh, is a main-belt asteroid with a slightly elliptical orbit that keeps it roughly 300 million kilometers from the Sun (about twice Earth’s distance). It was discovered in 1999, and added to Lucy’s list of targets after astronomers realized the spacecraft was going to pass relatively close to it. A small maneuver pushed Lucy’s path right past Dinkinesh, and will fly by at a distance of only 450 kilometers!
On September 3 and 5, Lucy took images of Dinkinesh, which were just released this week. Take a look:
Animated GIF showing thousands of stars in a black background, with the tiny dot of Dinkinesh circled and moving back and forth.
The animation blinks between the two observations, and you can see Dinkinesh moving between them (highlighted with the circle). This is really more about the spacecraft’s motion than the asteroid’s, but still, this shows that Lucy can see its target and that it’s getting closer. In an astronomical sense, at least: It was still about 23 million kilometers from Dinkinesh when it took these. But it’s moving rapidly, and will zip past in less than two months from now.
It’s not clear just how big Dinkinesh is, though it could be anywhere from 540 to 1,300 meters across, making it the smallest asteroid Lucy will visit. The spacecraft itself should nail down the size much better — the known distance between the two, the magnification of the camera, and the apparent size (in pixels) of the asteroid will make it a breeze to calculate.
For Scientific American, I wrote about this mission, this asteroid, and why they both have the names they do. I’m proud of that article, because I think it relays my own excitement, as well as why these names were chosen so carefully and what they mean. Please give it a read, and remember this come November 1. I really get a kick out of all we’re learning about very small asteroids, and every time we humans see one up close through our robotic proxies we learn even more.
Personal Stuff
Because I’m a person
Some good news: After 95 days of living on the road — some 5 hotels (6? I lost track), two different family members’ and one friend’s houses, and two AirBNBs — my wife and I have finally moved into our new house in Virginia.
WOOT.
It’s beautiful here. Hot and humid, as expected, but we live in a forest and I wake up every morning to a view of… trees. Just trees. It’s pretty nice.
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