Dr Samuel Jackson (Open University)
Andrea Simpson - andrea.simpson@physics.ox.ac.uk
Abstract: NASA’s Lucy mission, launched in October 2021, is due to visit several of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids over the course of a 12-year mission. A flyby of the main-belt asteroid (152830) Dinkinesh was conducted on 1st November 2023 as a rehearsal for the Trojan flybys and provided a test of the terminal tracking and instrument performance. The flyby also provided a wealth of scientifically valuable information about this previously unexplored asteroid, revealing a binary system with the secondary object consisting of two conjoined lobes (a contact binary satellite). Observations of Dinkinesh with the Lucy Thermal Emission Spectrometer (L’TES) allow us to determine its surface temperature distribution, enabling the derivation of properties of its regolith, such as thermal inertia and roughness, through comparison to thermophysical model simulations. I will discuss the results of work to characterise the thermal properties of Dinkinesh from these observations, and how these results may help to shape our understanding of binary asteroid formation and evolution.