The NASA "Lucy" spacecraft flew over the "Dinkinesh" asteroid and found a "small sidekick" 220m wide.

CTOnews.com, November 4, according to a recent press release issued by NASA, after the "Lucy" spacecraft flew over "Dinkinesh", it was accidentally discovered that the asteroid also had a "small entourage", which was a very tiny asteroid.

CTOnews.com learned from the report that Lucy flew over the asteroid Dinkinesh on November 1 and captured a picture of the asteroid and small moons about 435km from the asteroid.

Data and images sent back to Earth by the spacecraft confirmed that Dinkinesh was about 790 meters in diameter, while the satellite that circled it at close range was only 220 meters in size.

The encounter was mainly a flight test of the spacecraft, with a focus on testing a terminal tracking system that allows Lucy to track asteroids independently as they fly by at 10000 miles an hour.

Keith Noel, a project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said:

We know this will be the smallest main belt asteroid ever seen up close. In fact, it's two, which is even more exciting. In some ways, these asteroids look similar to the near-Earth asteroid binary stars Didymos and Dimorphos seen by DART, but there are some very interesting differences that we will study.