Lucy captures portrait of Earth and Moon on trip to Trojan asteroids

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured this humbling view of Earth and the Moon because it executed its first of three deliberate gravity assists round our planet, which is able to increase it to the speeds it wants to succeed in Jupiter’s orbit. The Lucy mission is designed to discover one main-belt asteroid and a number of other of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, which type two camps that each lead and observe the gas giant in its orbit across the Solar.

Lucy took the above portrait of our house world, which highlights the huge distance between Earth and its solely pure satellite, from a distance of about 890,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers), in keeping with a NASA statement. The picture was captured as a part of a calibration sequence carried about by Lucy’s Terminal Monitoring Digicam (T2CAM), which is designed to assist the spacecraft observe every of its asteroid targets when it rapidly flies by them.

After Lucy’s first Earth flyby, the spacecraft will swing out to past the orbit of Mars earlier than heading again towards Earth for an additional gravity increase in 2024. This second increase will ship Lucy to its first goal in 2025: the main-belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, named after the American paleoanthropologist who found the three.2-million-year-old hominin fossil nicknamed Lucy. (The nickname Lucy itself comes from the Beatles tune “Lucy within the Sky with Diamonds,” which Johanson’s staff listened to on the night time of their discovery.)