NASA’s Lucy Mission Confirms Target Asteroid Eurybates Has An Orbiting Satellite

NASA has confirmed that one of the Trojan asteroids identified as Eurybates has an orbiting natural satellite. The agency intends to study the satellite further once it visits Eurybates through its upcoming Lucy mission.

The Lucy mission is scheduled to launch sometime in October 2021 with the main objective of studying the Trojan asteroids, which are space rocks that are orbiting the Sun. As part of the mission, Lucy will fly close to the asteroid Eurybates.

As NASA continues to study the asteroid before the mission launches, the agency was able to uncover a surprising feature of the space rock. Through multiple observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA was able to confirm that Eurybates has a natural orbiting satellite.

The satellite was first observed by Hubble in September 2018. Follow-up observations by the space telescope in December 2019 and January helped NASA confirm the presence of the satellite.

According to the mission’s specialists, the satellite is less bright than Eurybates, which could be the reason why it was not detected sooner.

“This newly discovered satellite is more than 6,000 times fainter than Eurybates, implying a diameter less than 1 km,” Hal Levinson of the Southwest Research Institute and principal investigator for the Lucy mission said in a statement.

“If this estimate proves to be correct, it will be among the smallest asteroids visited,” he continued.

Through the latest discovery, NASA now intends to send the Lucy mission to study both Eurybates and its satellite. They will be part of the mission’s flyby encounters to study the asteroid belt moving across Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun. Dubbed as Jupiter Trojan asteroids, these space rocks are known to collide with one another.

For NASA’s scientists, studying these asteroids and their collisions will provide valuable information regarding the formation of space rocks and their satellites.

“There are only a handful of known Trojan asteroids with satellites, and the presence of a satellite is particularly interesting for Eurybates,” Thomas Statler, the NASA’s program scientist for Lucy explained. “It’s the largest member of the only confirmed Trojan collisional family – roughly 100 asteroids all traceable to, and probably fragments from, the same collision.”