NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will go through a small asteroids this weekend, since it reaches an even greater prize: the swarms of unexplored asteroids near Jupiter.
It will be the second Asteroid meeting for Lucy, launched in 2021 in a search that will take him to 11 space rocks. Nearby approaches should help scientists better understand our early solar system when planets were formed; Asteroids are the old leftovers.
The next Flyby is a dress essay for 2027 when Lucy reaches her first row of Trojan near Jupiter.
By increasing its three scientific instruments, the spacecraft will observe the harmless asteroid known as DonaldjoHanson. The meeting will take place 139 million miles (223 million kilometers) of the Earth in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, so far that each part of the data will take 12 minutes to reach the flight controllers in Colorado.
The paleontologist for whom the asteroid is named plans to be in the Spacecraft Builder and the control of the Mission of the Lockheed Martin operator for the entire action. Discovered the fossil Lucy in Ethiopia 50 years ago; The spacecraft bears the name of the famous human ancestor.
NASA Lucy will venture as close as 596 miles (960 kilometers) to this asteroid, approximately 2½ miles (4 kilometers) in length but much shorter wide. Scientists must have a better idea of their size and form after the brief visit. The spacecraft will approach more than 30,000 mph (48,000 kph).
The asteroid is among the innumerable fragments that are believed to result from an important collision 150 million years ago.
“It will not be a basic potato. We already know it,” said Main scientist Hal Levison from the Southwest Research Institute.
Rather, Levison said the asteroid can resemble a bowling pin or even a snowman like Arrowoth, the Kuiper Belt object visited by the new NASA Horizon spacecraft in 2019. The other possibility is that there are two elongated but very separated asteroids.
“We don’t know what to expect. That is what makes this so great,” he said.
There will be no communications with Lucy during the steering wheel, since the spacecraft separates its land antenna to track the asteroid. Levison hopes to have most scientific data in one day.
Lucy’s next stop, “the main event,” as Levison calls it, will be the Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit around the sun. Trojan swarms precede and follow the largest planet in the solar system while surrounding the sun. Lucy will visit eight of them from 2027 to 2033, some of them in pairs of two.
Lucy’s first asteroid steering wheel was in 2023 when he went through little Dinkinesh, also in the main asteroid belt. The spacecraft discovered a mini moon around him.
