152830 Dinkinesh

Summary

152830 Dinkinesh (provisional designation 1999 VD57) is a binary main-belt asteroid about 740 meters (2,400 feet) in diameter. It was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey at Socorro, New Mexico on 4 November 1999. Dinkinesh, the name borrowed from an Ethiopian word for the Lucy fossil, was the first flyby target of NASA's Lucy mission, which approached 425 km (264 mi) from the asteroid on 1 November 2023. During the flyby, the Lucy spacecraft discovered that Dinkinesh has a contact-binary natural satellite, named Selam, which is 220 meters (720 ft) in diameter. Dinkinesh is the smallest main-belt asteroid explored by spacecraft yet, though some smaller near-Earth asteroids have also been explored.