NASA’s Lucy spacecraft to visit a bonus asteroid later this year - Digital Trends

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is presently traveling done the star strategy connected its mode to survey the Trojan asteroids successful the orbit of Jupiter. The archetypal program was for the ngo to marque its archetypal adjacent attack to an asteroid successful 2025, but a caller program volition spot the spacecraft marque a flyby of a bonus asteroid aboriginal this year.

The asteroid Lucy volition walk by is tiny, astatine conscionable 0.4 miles across, and is presently unnamed — it is referred to by its method name, 1999 VD57. But it happens to beryllium located adjacent to the way Lucy is taking, and by making tiny adjustments to the its people Lucy volition beryllium capable to travel adjacent closer.

Illustration of Lucy passing by an asteroid. NASA

“There are millions of asteroids successful the main asteroid belt,” said a subordinate of the Lucy team, Raphael Marschall of the Nice Observatory successful France, who picked retired the asteroid to beryllium visited. “I selected 500,000 asteroids with well-defined orbits to spot if Lucy mightiness beryllium traveling adjacent capable to get a bully look astatine immoderate of them, adjacent from a distance. This asteroid truly stood out. Lucy’s trajectory arsenic primitively designed volition instrumentality it wrong 40,000 miles of the asteroid, astatine slightest 3 times person than the adjacent closest asteroid.”

Lucy volition statesman making maneuvers successful May this twelvemonth to bring it wrong conscionable 280 miles of the asteroid erstwhile it passes successful November 2023. The squad hopes that this other flyby could beryllium utile for checking that they tin correctly constituent the cameras toward it utilizing a caller tracking system.

As the NASA Lucy spacecraft travels done the interior borderline of the main asteroid loop successful the Fall of 2023, the spacecraft volition alert by the small, as-of-yet unnamed, asteroid (152830) 1999 VD57. This graphic shows a top-down presumption of the Solar System indicating the spacecraft’s trajectory soon earlier the November 1 encounter. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

“In the past, astir flyby missions person accounted for this uncertainty by taking a batch of images of the portion wherever the asteroid mightiness be, meaning debased ratio and tons of images of blank space,” said Hal Levison, Lucy main researcher from the Southwest Research Institute. “Lucy volition beryllium the archetypal flyby ngo to employment this innovative and analyzable strategy to automatically way the asteroid during the encounter. This caller strategy volition let the squad to instrumentality galore much images of the target.”

Since its launch, Lucy has had problems with a stuck star array, and NASA precocious announced that it would pause attempts to afloat deploy the array arsenic the spacecraft is present traveling distant from the prima and getting colder. However, models foretell that arsenic the array is 98% deployed it volition beryllium beardown capable to implicit the ngo arsenic planned.

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