arXiv:2309.13158astro-ph.EP
Size and Albedo Constraints for (152830) Dinkinesh Using WISE Data
Early discovery. Linked by one identifiable commenter. This paper is outside the main ranking; a mention is not an endorsement.
Abstract
Probing small main-belt asteroids provides insight into their formation and evolution through multiple dynamical and collisional processes. These asteroids also overlap in size with the potentially hazardous near-earth object population and supply the majority of these objects. The Lucy mission will provide an opportunity for study of a small main-belt asteroid, (152830) Dinkinesh. The spacecraft will perform a flyby of this object on November 1, 2023, in preparation for its mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. We employed aperture photometry on stacked frames of Dinkinesh obtained by the Wide-field-Infrared Survey Explorer and performed thermal modeling on a detection at 12 $μ$m to compute diameter and albedo values. Through this method, we determined Dinkinesh has an effective spherical diameter of $0.76^{+0.11}_{-0.21}$ km and a visual geometric albedo of $0.27^{+0.25}_{-0.06}$ at the 16th and 84th percentiles. This albedo is consistent with typical stony (S-type) asteroids.
Really exciting to see the pictures. I helped write code for a paper predicting the size of Dinkinesh a few weeks before the flyby. It's so small we had to overlay multiple images in order to even see it in IR. We did not expect a binary! https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.13158.pdf
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