Links
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- 152830 Dinkinesh on Wikipedia
152830 Dinkinesh
Details
Dinkinesh is a small stony main-belt asteroid and the first object visited by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft. The 2023 flyby revealed its moon Selam, the first known contact-binary satellite of an asteroid.
152830 Dinkinesh was chosen as a late addition to NASA’s Lucy mission, primarily to test the spacecraft’s tracking system before its encounters with the Jupiter Trojans. When Lucy passed the asteroid in November 2023, that rehearsal became a discovery encounter: Dinkinesh was not alone.
The images revealed Selam, a small moon made of two lobes touching each other. Contact binaries are familiar among asteroids, but Selam is the first known contact-binary satellite of an asteroid. Its shape turned a compact main-belt object into a surprisingly intricate three-lobed system.
Dinkinesh itself is a stony body with boulders, craters, and an equatorial ridge that records earlier movement of surface material. Together with Selam, it shows how much structure and dynamical history can be packed into an asteroid less than a kilometer across.
398m
Visual creditNASA / Goddard / SwRI / Johns Hopkins APL / NOIRLab / Public domainSource: Wikimedia Commons
Key facts
- Category
- Asteroids
- Object class
- Sq-type binary main-belt asteroid
- Composition
- Silicate rock and metal
- Scale fact
- 910 mmaximum extent
- Mass
- ~467 million tonnes
Scale context
Where 152830 Dinkinesh sits on the full axis
By size on the journey, 152830 Dinkinesh sits between 65803 Didymos and 162173 Ryugu. The band below uses nearby Asteroids objects for context.
Shared physical scale
5.22km
Together, these objects make the size change around 152830 Dinkinesh easy to compare at a glance.
Sources
References for 152830 Dinkinesh
Measurements and descriptive context are compiled by the Scale of Space team from the references below. If you find an error, please let us know.
- 152830 Dinkinesh — Wikipedia
- Visual reference: Wikimedia Commons (NASA / Goddard / SwRI / Johns Hopkins APL / NOIRLab, Public domain)
Between the smallest and the largest, perspective is everything.
About
Scale of Space is a scroll-based journey through the universe, placing objects on a single logarithmic scale so you can compare size across an unbroken range.
Guides turn parts of that scale into curated essays, while focused views let you explore the same range through specific groups of objects.