Researchers have utilized infrared survey data to refine the asteroid’s size and surface brightness in support of the Nov. 1 encounter by NASA’s Lucy mission.
as the spacecraft travels through deep space en route to Jupiter’s orbit. But before the spacecraft passes 265 miles from the surface of the small asteroid Dinkinesh, researchers have used 13-year-old infrared data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to support the mission’s flyby. Their new study provides updated estimates of the asteroid’s size and albedo – a measurement of surface reflectivity – that could help scientists better understand the nature of some near-Earth objects.
Located between Mars and Jupiter, the main asteroid belt is home to most asteroids in our solar system, including Dinkinesh, which is following an orbit around the Sun that places it near Lucy’s path. The Lucy mission is using the Dinkinesh encounter as an opportunity to test systems and procedures that are designed to keep the asteroid within the science instruments’ fields of view as the spacecraft flies past at 10,000 mph .
Although the signal was weak in the exposures captured by WISE, the authors managed to identify 17 infrared observations of the region of sky where Dinkinesh’s signal could be seen. Then they used an algorithm to align and stack the images. The observations were made in March 2010 and represent 36.5 hours of observing time.
“Dinkinesh wasn’t initially detected by WISE, because the asteroid’s infrared signal was too weak for the software that was designed to find objects in a single exposure,” said Kiana De’Marius McFadden, a graduate student at the University of Arizona and lead author of the study. “But the asteroid’s dim infrared signal was still there, so our main challenge was to first find Dinkinesh and then to stack multiple exposures of the same region of sky to get its signal to emerge from the noise.
Although WISE’s purpose wasn’t to detect asteroids, the spacecraft was sensitive to the infrared light radiating from them as a result of sunlight heating their rocky surfaces. WISE had recorded about 190,000 asteroid observations by the end of its prime mission. In 2013, NASA reactivated WISE and renamed the mission Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer will take over where NEOWISE leaves off.
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