The NASA spacecraft Lucy passes over the first of ten asteroids on its lengthy trip to Jupiter.
The first of 10 asteroids that NASA’s Lucy probe will meet on its arduous trip to Jupiter was encountered on Wednesday.
About 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) distant in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars, the spacecraft zipped by the tiny Dinkinesh on Wednesday. NASA described it as “a quick hello” when the spacecraft passed past at 10,000 mph (16,000 kmph).
Lucy tested its instruments on a dry run for the larger and more attractive asteroids ahead approaching Dinkinesh to within 270 miles (435 kilometers) of the spacecraft. Dinkinesh maybe the tiniest space rock on Lucy’s trip is only a half-mile (1 kilometer) wide
Lucy’s primary objectives are the so-called Trojans, a group of undiscovered asteroids around Jupiter that are thought to be ancient spacecraft preserved in time. The spacecraft will pass eight Trojans that are thought to be between ten and one hundred times larger than Dinkinesh. It is scheduled to fly by the last two asteroids in 2033.
Two years ago, NASA launched Lucy on her roughly $1 billion mission. The 3.2 million-year-old skeleton remains of a human progenitor discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s inspired the naming of the spacecraft. Next, Lucy will pass an asteroid called Donald Johanson in honor of one of the people who discovered the fossil Lucy.
The spaceship still has one loose solar wing. The mission is thought to be sufficiently stable but flight controllers gave up trying to stabilize it.
NASA refers to Asteroid Autumn and Wednesday’s flyby captures its highlights. September marked the return of NASA’s first asteroid debris samples. Then it sent a spacecraft to Psyche a rare and metal-rich asteroid in October.
Lucy’s objective is not to stop at asteroids or gather samples like earlier missions did.
The spacecraft’s return of all its images and data from the flyby will take at least a week.
Lead scientist Hal Levison of Southwest Research Institute noted in a release that Dinkinesh had only been an unresolved smudge in the best telescopes up to this point.
