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How will the acquaintance of space travelers end?
On Wednesday, the Lucy spacecraft will approach the small asteroid Dinkinesh at a distance of 425 km. Just over two years have passed since the launch of the Lucy mission on the Atlas V rocket, which headed for asteroids in the same orbit as Jupiter. After using a gravitational maneuver near Earth in 2022, the spacecraft was moving towards an intermediate goal, and now it has almost reached it.
The $1 billion Lucy mission will make its first flyby of an asteroid on Wednesday. According to NASA, the meeting will take place at 16:54 UTC. An hour before the rendezvous, the spacecraft will attempt to fix the asteroid in order to orient its instruments on it. This will allow you to take the best position to collect data from Dinkinesh when Lucy flies by at a speed of 4470 m/s.
During this maneuver, Lucy's main antenna will be pointed in the opposite direction to Earth, and there will be no communication with operators from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. After the flyby, Lucy will establish communication with Earth via the Deep Space Network, and images and other data will be transmitted to Earth within a few days.
This span is important for Lucy. First, this is the first real test of the vehicle's tracking system. If the system does not work, the asteroid will be a blurry spot on the background of passing Lucy.
The Lucy device is named after the remains of the ancient human Lucy, found in 1974 in Ethiopia. These remains play a key role in understanding human evolution. The NASA mission will study the "Trojan" asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter. Scientists believe that these asteroids are remnants of the era of planet formation in the Solar System.
The Dinkinesh asteroid, almost a kilometer in diameter, was discovered in 1999. When the Lucy mission selected it for its first flyby as a tracking system test, the asteroid did not yet have a name. Lucy mission scientists have proposed the name Dinkinesh, an Ethiopian name for Lucy's remains. This name was approved by the International Astronomical Union earlier this year.
On Wednesday, the Lucy spacecraft will approach the small asteroid Dinkinesh at a distance of 425 km. Just over two years have passed since the launch of the Lucy mission on the Atlas V rocket, which headed for asteroids in the same orbit as Jupiter. After using a gravitational maneuver near Earth in 2022, the spacecraft was moving towards an intermediate goal, and now it has almost reached it.
The $1 billion Lucy mission will make its first flyby of an asteroid on Wednesday. According to NASA, the meeting will take place at 16:54 UTC. An hour before the rendezvous, the spacecraft will attempt to fix the asteroid in order to orient its instruments on it. This will allow you to take the best position to collect data from Dinkinesh when Lucy flies by at a speed of 4470 m/s.
During this maneuver, Lucy's main antenna will be pointed in the opposite direction to Earth, and there will be no communication with operators from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. After the flyby, Lucy will establish communication with Earth via the Deep Space Network, and images and other data will be transmitted to Earth within a few days.
This span is important for Lucy. First, this is the first real test of the vehicle's tracking system. If the system does not work, the asteroid will be a blurry spot on the background of passing Lucy.
The Lucy device is named after the remains of the ancient human Lucy, found in 1974 in Ethiopia. These remains play a key role in understanding human evolution. The NASA mission will study the "Trojan" asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter. Scientists believe that these asteroids are remnants of the era of planet formation in the Solar System.
The Dinkinesh asteroid, almost a kilometer in diameter, was discovered in 1999. When the Lucy mission selected it for its first flyby as a tracking system test, the asteroid did not yet have a name. Lucy mission scientists have proposed the name Dinkinesh, an Ethiopian name for Lucy's remains. This name was approved by the International Astronomical Union earlier this year.