I'm John Basser with Bob Zimmerman. Your subscriptions and donations are most welcomed in this, the final short time to raise money for more adventures ahead. The adventures include

Lucy and a binary. What is Lucy? What is a binary Bob?

John, just quickly I once again have to thank your listeners for being so generous to donate

us behind the black in this short two week donation.

It's got a few more days to go, but I really do appreciate their generosity. It's been pretty remarkable and it's kept me alive and prevented my wife and I from starving. We appreciate that.

But Lucy, what is Lucy? Lucy is an asteroid probe that's going to be visiting about 11 asteroids, most of which are in the

Trojan asteroids which are in the orbit of Jupiter about 60 degrees for and half from

Jupiter and but it's on its way to the Trojans and on the way

it's going to be passing two main belt asteroids and Dinkinich was the first and they

did it did it on November 1st that was mostly really to test the

engineering of losing to make sure it could point it could take pictures you could

gather data as it did a flyby and it did a flyby and it took pictures and the

first picture revealed that

uh... dinkinish was actually a binary asteroid as though there was a second

asteroid orbiting dinkinish this was a surprise smaller

but then as the data came down more images arrived and the additional images said that not only was that second satellite asteroid

orbiting Dinkinish but it was a contact binary which means it was actually made up of two parts that are in

contact with each other and I got a picture on behind the black it's kind of cool

you can see the smaller asteroid the contact binary and the large I think anish

asteroid nearby.

Contact binaries, this is not the first that's been found and it does appear that this is not unusual.

Large asteroids can slowly move together, gently touch and stick.

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