On November 1, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft efficiently accomplished its first asteroid flyby. The 56 feet-long spacecraft got here inside 230 miles of the asteroid Dinkinesh aka “Dinky.” This pretty small house rock is in the primary asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
[Related: Meet Lucy: NASA’s new asteroid-hopping spacecraft.]
Dinkinesh is the first of 10 asteroids the probe will go to over the following 10 years. The asteroid is about 10 to 100 occasions smaller than the Jupiter Trojan asteroids which can be the primary goal of the Lucy mission. Dinkinesh is one other title for the Lucy fossil that this mission is called after. The three.2 million-year-old skeletal stays of a human ancestor have been present in Ethiopia in 1974.
Lucy zoomed by Dinkinesh at about 10,000 miles per hour. This encounter was the primary in-flight check of the spacecraft’s terminal monitoring system.
“The Lucy operations crew has confirmed that NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has phoned residence after its encounter with the small most important belt asteroid, Dinkinesh,” NASA wrote in a weblog publish. “Primarily based on the data acquired, the crew has decided that the spacecraft is in good well being and the crew has commanded the spacecraft to begin downlinking the info collected in the course of the encounter.”
It’s going to take NASA as much as per week to obtain the info on how Lucy carried out throughout this primary in-flight check in the course of the encounter. NASA deliberate for the high-resolution grayscale digital camera onboard Lucy to take a sequence of photos each quarter-hour. Dinkinesh has been seen to Lucy’s Lengthy Vary Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) as a single level of sunshine since early September. The crew started to make use of L’LORRI to help with the navigation of the spacecraft.
Lucy’s thermal infrared instrument (L’TES) must also start to gather knowledge. Since L’TES was not designed to watch an asteroid fairly as small as Dinkinesh, the crew is to see if it may well detect the half-mile vast asteroid and measure its temperature in the course of the encounter.
Astronomers plan to make use of the info from this strategy to achieve a higher understanding of small near-Earth asteroids and in the event that they originate from bigger most important belt asteroids.
Launched in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy mission is the primary spacecraft set to discover the Trojan asteroids. These are a gaggle of primitive house rocks orbiting our photo voltaic system’s largest planet Jupiter. They orbit in two swarms, with one forward of Jupiter and the opposite laggin behind it. Lucy is anticipated to supply the primary high-resolution photos of what these house rocks seem like.
There are about 7,000 asteroids on this belt with the most important about 160 miles throughout. The asteroids are just like fossils and signify the leftover materials that’s nonetheless hanging round after the enormous planets together with Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter, and Saturn fashioned.
[Related: New image reveals a Jupiter-like world that may share its orbit with a ‘twin.’]
In 2024, Lucy will return in the direction of Earth for a second gravity push that may give it the vitality wanted to cross the photo voltaic system’s most important asteroid belt. It’s anticipated to watch asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson in 2025. This asteroid is called after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johnson, one the scientists who found the Lucy fossils.
It’s going to then journey into the main Trojan asteroid swarm. After that, the spacecraft will fly previous six Trojan asteroids: Eurybates and its satellite tv for pc Queta, Polymele and its but unnamed satellite tv for pc, Leucus, and Orus.
In 2030, Lucy will return to Earth for yet one more bump that may gear it up for a rendezvous with the Patroclus-Menoetius binary asteroid pair within the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm. This mission is scheduled to finish a while in 2033.