NASA’s Jupiter Trojan asteroid-scouting mission has been given a further space rock to go to, bringing the journey’s total to 10 asteroids.
The Lucy mission crew formally added main-belt asteroid 1999 VD57 to Lucy’s listing of targets on Jan. 24. The addition will permit the spacecraft to check its progressive goal monitoring system and introduce us to a different small world years earlier than Lucy reaches its main science targets within the outer solar system.
“There are tens of millions of asteroids in the primary asteroid belt,” Raphael Marschall, a Lucy collaborator on the Good Observatory in France, who recognized asteroid 1999 VD57 as an object of particular curiosity for Lucy, stated in a statement. “This asteroid actually stood out. Lucy’s trajectory as initially designed will take it inside 40,000 miles of the asteroid, a minimum of 3 times nearer than the following closest asteroid.”
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Lucy launched in October 2021 and is on a 12-year-long mission to go to two separate units of Jupiter‘s Trojan asteroids, which orbit the sun forward of and behind the enormous gasoline planet, reaching these teams in 2027 and 2033 respectively.
Asteroid 1999 VD57 is an S-type, or stony, asteroid with the provisional identify Dinkinesh, Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator and a planetary scientist on the Southwest Analysis Institute in Colorado, stated on Thursday (Jan. 26) at a presentation to NASA’s Small Our bodies Advisory Group. The asteroid was not recognized as a goal earlier as a result of this can be very small, in response to the crew, however its presence now gives the mission a helpful alternative to conduct an additional costume rehearsal for its Trojan tour.
Lucy’s unique trajectory would have taken it inside 40,000 miles (64,400 kilometers) of the two,300-foot (700 meters) diameter asteroid, however a collection of small maneuvers starting in Could will permit the spacecraft to make a a lot nearer method, coming inside roughly 280 miles (450 km) on Nov. 1.
The flyby will give the crew an early alternative to check its twin Terminal Monitoring Cameras (T2CAM), which the spacecraft will primarily use to robotically lock onto and observe asteroids throughout flybys and ensure Lucy’s different devices are pointed in the correct route, which has historically been difficult.
“Previously, most flyby missions have accounted for this uncertainty by taking plenty of photographs of the area the place the asteroid could be, that means low effectivity and plenty of photographs of clean space,” Levison stated in a statement.
“Lucy would be the first flyby mission to make use of this progressive and sophisticated system to robotically observe the asteroid in the course of the encounter,” he stated. “This novel system will permit the crew to take many extra photographs of the goal.”
Lucy has already imaged the moon when it made the primary of three flybys of the Earth that can allow its journey to Jupiter’s Trojans. The mission crew additionally not too long ago introduced that that they had suspended efforts to completely deploy one of many spacecraft’s solar arrays, leaving it at 98% unfurled; the crew is assured this lacking slither won’t affect the mission, officers stated.
The mission’s first encounter with a space rock was beforehand slated to be its 2025 flyby of the primary belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, named for the paleontologist who found the fossil Lucy, which in flip impressed the identify of the NASA mission.
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