Engineers have been working to repair an issue with a NASA spacecraft, Lucy, which launched in October 2021 and is on its solution to go to the Trojan asteroids close to Jupiter.
The issue is with considered one of Lucy’s massive, spherical photo voltaic arrays. The spacecraft has two such arrays that acquire vitality from the solar, considered one of which deployed as anticipated, and the opposite of which skilled points deploying. The arrays ought to have opened up and locked into place, however considered one of them did not latch into place. Subsequent investigations discovered that the array had deployed to about 345 of 360 levels.
The excellent news was that even not absolutely deployed, the arrays had been nonetheless accumulating sufficient energy for the spacecraft to proceed its journey. The unhealthy information was the crew’s concern that when the spacecraft wanted to fireside its important engines, the array is likely to be broken by the forces.
In April, NASA introduced that the Lucy crew had a plan to deal with the problem. The photo voltaic arrays had been pulled into place by a motor that’s connected to a lanyard, which pulls the array out into its round form throughout deployment. The lanyard appeared to have develop into snagged on the array which didn’t absolutely deploy. So the thought was to make use of each the first motor and the backup secondary motor collectively to place extra drive onto the lanyard to attempt to unsnag it and latch the array into place.
The crew tried this for the primary time on Could 9, working each motors. This labored to reel in among the lanyards, however the motors can solely be operated for a short while to forestall them from overheating. The crew ran this identical operation once more on Could 12, which tensioned the lanyard additional, as they hoped.
On Could 26, with the lanyard now underneath rigidity and holding the array in place, they tried to completely deploy the array once more. They didn’t handle to latch the array this time, although it did deploy additional. They did so once more on June 2, as soon as once more deploying extra of the array however nonetheless not latching in place.
This course of is quite painstaking, however progress is being made which is nice information for the mission. NASA additionally says that the progress being made right here will assist preserve the array safer, even when they aren’t in a position to latch it in place as could be ideally suited.
“The crew has a number of extra alternatives to repeat these deployment instructions,” NASA wrote in an replace. “Whereas there is no such thing as a assure that further makes an attempt will latch the array, there may be robust proof that the method is placing the array underneath extra rigidity, additional stabilizing it. Even when the array doesn’t in the end latch, the extra stiffening could also be sufficient to fly the mission as deliberate.”
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