On November 1 a NASA spacecraft called Lucy will introduce humans to a earth called Dinkinesh—nicknamed Dinky—the smallest primary-belt asteroid we’ve at any time seen up shut.

Lucy launched in 2021 to examine a mysterious team of asteroids termed Jupiter’s Trojans. These place rocks orbit the solar at the identical length as Jupiter in two clusters: a single cluster races forward of the gasoline giant even though the other trails at the rear of the world. All instructed, scientists know of additional than 12,000 of these objects in Jupiter’s orbit, and they think this eclectic team of primitive place rocks could assist decode the solar system’s early history. For this reason Lucy will zip earlier 6 of Jupiter’s Trojans commencing in 2027.

“The intention of Lucy is to recognize the variety of Trojans,” suggests Hal Levison, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Analysis Institute in Colorado and principal investigator on the Lucy mission. “In order to do that, you have to have to pay a visit to lots of objects, which is what we’re performing, and in purchase to do that, you will need to be hauling ass.”

Lucy is moving so swiftly that the mission’s key science observations full just 24 hours unfold throughout the spacecraft’s 12-calendar year trek about the photo voltaic system, Levison states. The mission is only flying past its targets, not building extended stays—and the moment the probe has still left an asteroid, that’s it. “There’s no going back again there’s no do-overs,” he claims.

So when mission personnel recognized that as Lucy trekked through the outer photo voltaic technique, it would fly inside of 40,000 miles of a small, then nameless asteroid, they made a decision to detour for a dress rehearsal and nudged the mission’s trajectory to move just 280 miles from the very small physique. For the reason that of Dinkinesh’s alignment with the sunshine and the spacecraft during the flyby, the maneuver will superior mimic potential planned Trojan flybys than the mission’s initial 1st target, yet another major-belt asteroid Lucy is established to face in 2025.

(The Lucy mission will take its title from an historical hominin fossil located in northern Ethiopia that prompt that some 3.2 million decades in the past, early human family members ended up going for walks on two toes in Amharic, the fossil is known as Dinkinesh. The spacecraft’s 2025 focus on, asteroid Donaldjohanson, is named for the paleoanthropologist who led the excavation that unearthed Lucy in 1974.)

In addition, Lucy’s science crew has a lot more induce for panic about the flybys than it would have hoped. Through the months subsequent Lucy’s launch, spacecraft staff struggled to thoroughly unfurl just one of the probe’s two round solar arrays right before ultimately concluding the mission was okay to progress just shy of thoroughly locking the array in put. The spacecraft’s great functionality in the course of a flyby of Earth final fall validated this decision, but the unlatched array could result in the spacecraft—and its instruments—to shake extra than planned while executing flyby observations, perhaps reducing the good quality of Lucy’s facts. Tests the technique on Dinkinesh will give the group more than enough time to change the probe’s solution to each individual Trojan goal if necessary to ensure sharp photographs and measurements.

So for Lucy, Dinkinesh is first and foremost an engineering take a look at and a apply run. But planetary scientists—who never ever transform down an chance to see a little something new in the solar system—are excited for their glimpse of the minimal house rock.

“The science is a reward, but reward science is constantly truly fascinating in my experience,” states Jessica Sunshine, a planetary scientist at the College of Maryland and a Lucy co-investigator. “Collectively, in planetary science, we have under no circumstances flown by an item and went, ‘Eh, effectively, that was variety of tedious.’”

When Dinkinesh was formally extra to Lucy’s itinerary earlier this yr, experts realized only its site and unimpressive size. “We knew it was form of small—but absolutely nothing else, basically,” suggests Julia de León, a planetary scientist at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands who is not on the Lucy mission but assisted coordinate some preparatory peeks at Dinkinesh. “So we all did our finest,” she says, with astronomers hustling to telescopes to study additional about the asteroid.

Many thanks to those people efforts, experts now have a relatively superior photograph of Dinkinesh, which is shaping up to be an intriguing minimal area rock: prosperous in silica, approximately rectangular and sedately spinning, with an approximated diameter of circa 900 meters and a working day about twice the size of Earth’s 24-hour diurnal period.

In the primary asteroid belt involving Mars and Jupiter, researchers have only frequented considerably greater house rocks, these types of as the Dawn mission’s targets, the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf earth Ceres, which are amid the premier known objects in the belt. Equally are hundreds of situations larger than Dinkinesh. “It is by much the smallest factor we have at any time seen in the major belt,” Sunshine claims of Lucy’s tiny goal.

Dinkinesh seems similar in scale to a number of in close proximity to-Earth asteroids that spacecraft have just lately seen up shut, nonetheless. These include things like carbon-prosperous Bennu, samples of which NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission recently shipped to Earth, as very well as Didymos, which NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Take a look at (DART) mission zipped past on its way to impacting the asteroid’s smaller moon, Dimorphos.

Comparing Dinkinesh and Didymos really should be significantly exciting, Sunshine claims, mainly because the two asteroids are designed of the exact same variety of materials kind and are comparable measurements, just in distinctive destinations. “It’s unusual that we get to have that form of direct comparison in our line of science, so I was quite psyched when this turned an obvious flyby goal for Lucy,” she suggests.

This sort of a immediate comparison is specially worthwhile mainly because experts imagine that in the vicinity of-Earth asteroids hail from the major belt, possessing been kicked further into the solar method by past gravitational perturbations. So experts hope that Lucy’s glimpse of Dinkinesh will assist them comprehend the modifications primary-belt asteroids undertake as they renovate into in close proximity to-Earth asteroids. “It will be like finding out a in close proximity to-Earth asteroid at its source location, in which it is generated,” de León states.

Lucy’s flyby of Dinkinesh will agency up scientists’ preliminary estimates of the asteroid’s simple condition and composition and will also allow for them to depend craters on its surface area to greater calibrate its age. And precise science queries apart, asteroid professionals are just enthusiastic to see one more of the photo voltaic system’s house rocks snap into focus.

“It’s heading to be incredible to see these [images] occur down,” Sunshine says. “It does not get old I’ll explain to you that much.”