NASA’s Lucy spacecraft on Wednesday encountered the primary of 10 asteroids on its lengthy journey to Jupiter.
The spacecraft on Wednesday swooped previous the pint-sized Dinkinesh, about 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) away within the main asteroid belt past Mars. It was “a fast hi there,” in keeping with NASA, with the spacecraft zooming by at 10,000 mph (16,000 kph).
Lucy got here inside 270 miles (435 kilometers) of Dinkinesh, testing its devices in a dry run for the larger and extra alluring asteroids forward. Dinkinesh is only a half-mile (1 kilometer) throughout, fairly probably the smallest of the space rocks on Lucy’s tour.
Lucy’s essential targets are the so-called Trojans, swarms of unexplored asteroids out close to Jupiter which are thought-about to be time capsules from the daybreak of the solar system. The spacecraft will swing previous eight Trojans believed to be as much as 10 to 100 instances greater than Dinkinesh. It is as a result of zip previous the ultimate two asteroids in 2033.
NASA launched Lucy on its practically $1 billion mission two years in the past. The spacecraft is known as after the three.2 million-year-old skeletal stays of a human ancestor present in Ethiopia within the Nineteen Seventies. Lucy will subsequent swing previous an asteroid named after one of many fossil Lucy’s discoverers: Donald Johanson.
One in every of two solar wings on the spacecraft stays free. Flight controllers gave up making an attempt to latch it down, however it’s believed to be secure sufficient for all the mission.
Wednesday’s flyby caps what NASA is looking Asteroid Autumn. NASA returned its first samples of rubble from an asteroid in September. Then in October, it launched a spacecraft to a rare, metal-rich asteroid named Psyche.
In contrast to these missions, Lucy is not going to cease at any asteroids or acquire any samples.
It’ll take at the very least per week for the spacecraft to ship again all its footage and knowledge from the flyby.
Till now, Dinkinesh’s solely been “an unresolved smudge in the most effective telescopes,” Southwest Analysis Institute’s Hal Levison, the lead scientist, mentioned in an announcement.
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