NASA's Lucy spacecraft is adding one more asteroid to its flyby list, bringing its total...
is adding one more asteroid to its flyby list, bringing its total to 10 and giving scientists a close-up look 17 months sooner than expected.that share Jupiter’s orbit around the sun. These space rocks could unlock secrets to the formation of planets in our solar system.NASA’s Lucy mission will spend 12 years examining Jupiter asteroids with clues to solar system
Lucy launched in October 2021, and scientists expected it would reach the first asteroid, Donaldjohanson, in the main asteroid belt in April of 2025. That was to be followed by eight Trojan asteroids, some orbiting ahead of Jupiter and some trailing behind, between August 2027 and March 2033. Now, Lucy will pass roughly 280 miles from a yet-to-be-named asteroid — currently referred to as 1999 VD57 — in the main asteroid belt on Nov. 1, 2023. This was added so Lucy's team could test the spacecraft's asteroid-tracking navigation system. This new system addresses a problem that had plagued previous flyby missions: it was difficult to determine precisely how far the spacecraft was from the target and which way to point the cameras.
“In the past, most flyby missions have accounted for this uncertainty by taking a lot of images of the region where the asteroid might be, meaning low efficiency and lots of images of blank space,” Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute,. “Lucy will be the first flyby mission to employ this innovative and complex system to automatically track the asteroid during the encounter. This novel system will allow the team to take many more images of the target.
The new asteroid was announced just days after NASA said it would stop trying to fully open Lucy's solar array.
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