Located in the Namib Desert, it is the highest mountain in Namibia at 8,550 feet and even from the ground, its visible from great distances across the desert. The observations were made by Lucy's high-resolution camera, the L'LORRI instrument-short for Lucy LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager-provided by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. NASAs image of Brandberg Mountain, taken in 1993, shows just how much this peak stands out against the rest of the desert landscape. Celestial north is to the right of the frame, which is about 74,500 miles across (120,000 km). At this distance, Dinkinesh is only 19 magnitude, about 150,000 times fainter than that star. The brightest star in this field of view is HD 34258, a 7.6 magnitude star in the constellation Auriga that is too dim to be seen by the naked eye from Earth. Nicknamed the Tarantula Nebula for the appearance of its dusty filaments in previous telescope images, the nebula has long been a favorite for. Dinkinesh will remain an unresolved point of light during the long approach and won't start to show surface detail until the day of the encounter. Once upon a space-time, a cosmic creation story unfolded: Thousands of never-before-seen young stars spotted in a stellar nursery called 30 Doradus, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. NASA has used satellite imagery of the Earth at. Lucy will continue to image the asteroid over the next months as part of its optical navigation program, which uses the asteroid's apparent position against the star background to determine the relative position of Lucy and Dinkinesh to ensure an accurate flyby. But it makes for more than just a pretty picture, theres a lot to be learned from all those glittering lights. The Lucy team will use this encounter as an opportunity to test out spacecraft systems and procedures, focusing on the spacecraft's terminal tracking system, designed to keep the asteroid within the instruments' fields of view as the spacecraft flies by at 10,000 mph (4.5 km/s). ![]() ![]() NASA Image of the Day In this image from July 24, 2023, astronaut Frank Rubio completes a session on the Surface Avatar Remote Control Terminal, which investigates how haptic controls, user interfaces, and virtual reality could command and control surface-bound robots from long distances. Over the next two months, Lucy will continue toward Dinkinesh until its closest approach of 265 miles (425 km) on Nov. The latest NASA 'Image of the Day' image. Lucy took these images while it was 14 million miles (23 million km) away from the asteroid, which is only about a half-mile wide (1 km).
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