NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, which launched in 2021, is on its technique to the orbit of Jupiter to check the Trojan asteroids there. It gained’t arrive there till 2027, however the spacecraft could have the chance to do some additional science earlier than then, as it would quickly be making a flyby of one other asteroid referred to as Dinkinesh. At lower than half a mile extensive, this small asteroid sits in the principle asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and it is going to be Lucy’s first asteroid flyby.
Lucy is scheduled to make the flyby on November 1, in a maneuver that was added to the mission as a bonus aim earlier this yr. The staff members realized that Lucy could be touring shut sufficient to the asteroid that they might make some additional maneuvers and carry out a flyby, giving them the possibility to take a look at among the spacecraft’s asteroid-tracking devices.
It’s additionally the primary time that the asteroid could have been noticed so shut. “That is the primary time Lucy will probably be getting an in depth take a look at an object that, up up to now, has solely been an unresolved smudge in one of the best telescopes,” mentioned Hal Levison of the Southwest Analysis Institute, Lucy principal investigator, in a press release. “Dinkinesh is about to be revealed to humanity for the primary time.”
The flyby will probably be used to check out the spacecraft’s system for finding an asteroid and locking its devices onto its location because it flies previous. That is vital as when Lucy ultimately reaches its targets within the Trojans, it would carry out flybys of 10 asteroids slightly than going into orbit round any one in every of them. With the monitoring system in place, the spacecraft ought to be capable of level its cameras extra exactly and gather extra correct knowledge.
“We’ll know what the spacecraft ought to be doing always, however Lucy is so far-off it takes about half-hour for radio alerts to journey between the spacecraft and Earth, so we are able to’t command an asteroid encounter interactively,” mentioned Mark Effertz, Lucy chief engineer at Lockheed Martin House. “As an alternative, we pre-program all of the science observations. After the science observations and flyby are full, Lucy will reorient its high-gain antenna towards Earth, after which it would take almost half-hour for the primary sign to make it to Earth.”
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