NASA adds asteroid flyby to Lucy mission – SpaceNews
WASHINGTON — NASA has additional an additional asteroid flyby to its Lucy mission later this 12 months that will present a take a look at of its abilities for upcoming encounters.
NASA declared Jan. 25 that the spacecraft will fly by the compact key-belt asteroid 1999 VD57 on Nov. 1. The challenge chosen that asteroid right after one particular scientist collaborating on the mission, Raphael Marschall of France’s Wonderful Observatory, as opposed the spacecraft’s trajectory to the orbits of 500,000 asteroids.
Lucy’s latest trajectory will just take the spacecraft as shut at 64,000 kilometers to the asteroid. The spacecraft will perform a sequence of maneuvers setting up in Might to alter its trajectory so that it will instead pass 450 kilometers from the asteroid.
Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy at the Southwest Study Institute, mentioned at a Jan. 25 conference of NASA’s Small Bodies Evaluation Team that the mission team has supplied 1999 VD57 the provisional identify of Dinkinesh. That is the Ethiopian title for the Lucy fossil following which the NASA mission is named. The name is pending formal acceptance by the Intercontinental Astronomical Union.
Dinkinesh is a S-form asteroid, he reported, with a diameter of no a lot more than 800 meters and similar in sizing to Bennu, the in close proximity to Earth asteroid frequented by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. It would be the smallest most important-belt asteroid that a spacecraft has flown by.
Even though the flyby will obtain images and other facts about the asteroid, that is not the key reason for the close approach. “This is a threat mitigation exercising,” Levison reported, concentrating on the “terminal tracking system” the spacecraft will use to lock on to the asteroid as it strategies, maximizing the facts its instruments acquire.
That program has some heritage from previous missions but has hardly ever been tested in area prior to. “We made a decision that it is advantageous to exam it out as shortly as we can,” he mentioned.
The flyby of Dinkinesh is in addition to an additional most important-belt asteroid, 52246 Donaldjohanson, that it will fly by in 2025. Lucy will then fly by many Trojan asteroids at Jupiter’s length from the sunshine concerning 2027 and 2033.
The Dinkinesh flyby will also examination how perfectly it can issue at a goal provided that a person of its two huge round solar arrays has not latched into place. “We’re not accurately positive, presented that the solar array is not latched, of the pointing stability traits of the spacecraft, so this will also help us determine that,” he explained.
NASA announced Jan. 19 that it was suspending attempts to entirely deploy that solar array soon after the most the latest deployment try in December showed only “minimal levels” of development. The array, the agency reported, was almost totally deployed and appeared to be secure, but did not rule out added efforts to lock it into position late subsequent yr, when the spacecraft can make a different Earth flyby.
Levison claimed that, in the December attempt, there were being symptoms that the array was tensioning, which he stated was a positive sign. “It will make us seriously really confident that it is risk-free to fly the mission as-is,” he stated.