Lucy - Asteroid Dinkinesh Flyby

  • Released Sunday, October 1, 2023
View full credits

A top-down view of the inner solar system, with planets shown in gray, Lucy in teal, and Dinkinesh in pink. The Lucy/Dinkinesh close approach will occur on November 1, 2023.

The Lucy mission is already breaking records by planning to visit nine asteroids during its 12-year tour of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. Originally, Lucy was not scheduled to get a close-up view of any asteroids until 2025, when it will fly by the main belt asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson. However, the Lucy team identified a small asteroid in the inner main belt, designated (152830) 1999 VD57, recently named ‘Dinkinesh’, as a potential new and useful target for the Lucy spacecraft.

A top-down view of the inner solar system, with planets shown in gray, Lucy in teal, and Dinkinesh in pink. The Lucy/Dinkinesh close approach will occur on November 1, 2023. This version does not include a date stamp.

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Datasets used

Note: While we identify the data sets used on this page, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.

This page was originally published on Sunday, October 1, 2023.
This page was last updated on Thursday, August 31, 2023 at 4:52 PM EDT.