Probing small main-belt asteroids provides insight into their formation and evolution through multiple dynamical and collisional processes. These asteroids also overlap in size with the potentially hazardous near-earth object population and supply the majority of these objects. The Lucy mission will provide an opportunity for study of a small main-belt asteroid, (152830) Dinkinesh. The spacecraft will perform a flyby of this object on November 1, 2023, in preparation for its mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. We employed aperture photometry on stacked frames of Dinkinesh obtained by the Wide-field-Infrared Survey Explorer and performed thermal modeling on a detection at 12 μm to compute diameter and albedo values. Through this method, we determined Dinkinesh has an effective spherical diameter of 0.76−0.21+0.11 km and a visual geometric albedo of 0.27−0.06+0.25 at the 16th and 84th percentiles. This albedo is consistent with typical stony (S-type) asteroids.
@article{arxiv.2309.13158,
title = {Size and Albedo Constraints for (152830) Dinkinesh Using WISE Data},
author = {Kiana D. McFadden and Amy K. Mainzer and Joseph R. Masiero and James M. Bauer and Roc M. Cutri and Dar Dahlen and Frank J. Masci and Jana Pittichová and Akash Satpathy and Edward L. Wright},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.13158},
year = {2023}
}