152830 Dinkinesh

152830 Dinkinesh

Asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh is named in honor of the fossil hominin commonly known as "Lucy." Discovered on September 8, 2000, by American astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona, USA, the asteroid was named after the Amharic word "Dinkinesh," which means "You are marvelous" or "You are wonderful." This name was used by the Ethiopian researcher Donald Johanson and his team when they discovered the famous fossil remains of the Australopithecus afarensis species, commonly known as Lucy, in the Afar region of Ethiopia in 1974. In 2023 the Lucy mission performed a flyby of Dinkinesh, revealing the asteroid in high-resolution images. A contact-binary satellite Salem was discovered, the first contact-binary satellite for an asteroid discovered.