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 area rock is in the primary asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
[Related: Meet Lucy: NASA’s new asteroid-hopping spacecraft.]
Dinkinesh is the primary 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 are the primary goal of the Lucy mission. Dinkinesh is one other title for the Lucy fossil that this mission is known as after. The 3.2 million-year-old skeletal stays of a human ancestor had been discovered 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 team has confirmed that NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has phoned home after its encounter with the small main belt asteroid, Dinkinesh,” NASA wrote in a weblog put up. “Based on the information received, the team has determined that the spacecraft is in good health and the team has commanded the spacecraft to start downlinking the data collected during the encounter.”
It will take NASA up to per week to obtain the information on how Lucy carried out throughout this primary in-flight check in the course of the encounter. NASA deliberate for the high-resolution grayscale digicam onboard Lucy to take a sequence of pictures each quarter-hour. Dinkinesh has been seen to Lucy’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) as a single level of sunshine since early September. The crew started to use L’LORRI to help with the navigation of the spacecraft.
Lucy’s thermal infrared instrument (L’TES) also needs to start to gather information. Since L’TES was not designed to observe 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 use the information from this method to acquire a greater understanding of small near-Earth asteroids and in the event that they originate from bigger predominant belt asteroids.
Launched in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy mission is the primary spacecraft set to discover the Trojan asteroids. These are a bunch of primitive area 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 predicted to present the primary high-resolution pictures of what these area rocks appear like.
There are about 7,000 asteroids in this belt with the most important about 160 miles throughout. The asteroids are comparable to fossils and characterize 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 direction of Earth for a second gravity push that can give it the vitality wanted to cross the photo voltaic system’s predominant asteroid belt. It is predicted to observe asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson in 2025. This asteroid is known as after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johnson, one the scientists who found the Lucy fossils.
It will 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 one more bump that can gear it up for a rendezvous with the Patroclus-Menoetius binary asteroid pair in the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm. This mission is scheduled to finish a while in 2033.