#dinkinesh

Madness is repetition.

Perhaps madness compelled a dusty tape recorder to belt “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” over and over, the evening of November 24th, 1974 - as 11 Westerners pored over the broken body they had found by the Awash River in Ethiopia.

The body was shattered into pieces, numbering in the hundreds. Less than half of the body recovered, and they delighted in every piece they found. Those from Ethiopia call the corpse “Dinkinesh” - “You are marvelous”. The Westerners took the tape-player’s cue that night.

“Lucy” wasn’t the first body found by the Awash, and wouldn’t be the last. Her mangled pieces toured the West for much of the late 2000s. She was laid behind glass in Addis Ababa, and has been there 6 years this May. Guests whisper, over and over: “You are marvelous”.

Dinkinesh is our Jane Doe - captivating to all, difficult to discern. She would’ve been 12 years when her body was broken - mature for her kind. As chance has it, she was a woman - or could carry child, as some women can. She stood at 3’7”, and saw out with familiar eyes.

Australopithecus afarensis saw over a world like Taung would a million years hence: dense forest, corralled by grass, serviced by megafauna. She may have spent more time in the trees, to avoid danger.

A twisted mind could call it funny then, how our Jane Doe fell to doom.

A body in so many pieces showed no signs of feasting, or even desperate scavenging. A single sharp tooth left a single mark upon her hip-bone, but folks have walked away from worse.

But perhaps Lucy didn’t walk towards death. Perhaps, 3 million years ago, she fell.

Force of impact would’ve started at her feet, moving up her body, shattering bones like dried clay. It is rare one could say “destroyed” of someone, but here it is.

It’s the damage that one sees in victims of accidents, suicides... or when one wants to fake the latter.

No suspects can be identified at this time. While this would’ve been the time when mates were selecting for compassion, anyone can tell you there is hatred in a small community. It would’ve been easy for some rival, jealous at her marvel, to give Lucy a gentle push...

The vertigo as Dinkinesh fell, down, down, down towards the cold ground... her stomach would turn and turn, over and over. It would have happened so quickly, but would the repetition have driven her mad? Could she still be feeling it, echoed through stone, into eternity?

A. afarensis has been known for over 45 years, and since has improved our understanding of our evolutionary context. She is a watershed in paleo-anthropological outreach, as well - so many have heard the name “Lucy”, over and over... “You are marvelous”, over and over...

evolution_soup

Here's Lucy! Well, a cast of the famous 40% skeleton displayed at the Natural History Museum London.

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Lucy is the common name of AL 288-1, several hundred pieces of bone fossils representing 40 percent of the skeleton of a female of the hominin   species Australopithecus afarensis. In Ethiopia, the assembly is also known as Dinkinesh, which means "you are marvelous" in the Amharic language.

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Le prime immagini dell’asteroide Donaldjohanson. Ecco le prime immagini dell’asteroide Donaldjohanson, riprese dalla sonda Lucy in volo verso il pianeta Giove e i suoi asteroidi Troiani. Dal sito della NASA traduco (con l’Intelligenza Personale, IP e non certo con quella Artificiale) le ultime notizie con le prime immagini dell’asteroide Donaldjohanson, riprese nella fase di massimo avvicinamento della sonda Lucy, nel corso del suo lungo viaggio che la porterà a studiare da vicino un gran numero di asteroidi Troiani, in prossimità di Giove. Le prime foto dell’asteroide Donaldjohanson. Nel corso del suo secondo incontro, la sonda Lucy ha scattato foto del frammento di un asteroide che si è formato circa 150 milioni di anni fa: la sonda ha iniziato ad inviare queste immagini riprese da una distanza minima di 960km, il giorno di Pasqua, il 20 aprile. In questa animazione vediamo Donaldjohanson ripreso dallo strumento L’LORRI (Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager): le singole immagini di questo timelapse sono state riprese ogni 2 secondi. L’asteroide ruota molto lentamente e la sua rotazione apparente è dovuta al moto della sonda nel corso dell’avvicinamento tra 1100 e 1600km: successivamente a queste immagini la sonda si è avvicinata fino alla distanza di 960km. credit : NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL Precedentemente le osservazioni dell’asteroide hanno mostrato grandi variazioni di luminosità lungo un periodo di 10 giorni, cosicché alcune aspettative del team tecnico della Lucy sono state confermate dall’aspetto dell’asteroide, un oggetto binario a contatto, che si forma a seguito della collisione di due frammenti più piccoli. Ma il team è rimasto sorpreso dalla strana forma dello stretto collo che connette le due parti componenti, due lobi che ricordano due coni gelato fusi tra loro. Hal Levison, PI del progetto presso il Southwest Research Institute, a Boulder nel Colorado afferma che “Donaldjohanson presenta una geologia molto complessa. E come studieremo nel dettaglio queste strutture complesse, avremo senz’altro informazioni maggiori sui blocchi che formano questi asteroidi e sui processi collisionali che hanno portato alla formazione dei pianeti del Sistema Solare”. Da una prima analisi di queste immagini rilasciate dalla sonda Lucy, l’asteroide appare più grande rispetto alle stime iniziali, presentando una lunghezza di circa 8km ed una larghezza massima di 3.5 km.

152830 Dinkinesh (provisional designation 1999 VD57) is a binary main-belt asteroid about 790 meters (2,600 feet) in diameter. It was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey at Socorro, New Mexico on 4 November 1999.

On Nov. 1, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft flew by not just its first asteroid, but its first two. The first images returned by Lucy reveal that the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh is actually a binary pair.