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The American Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced new news about the Lucy spacecraft. The probe is on its way to the first asteroid, the meeting will be
The American Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced new news about the Lucy spacecraft. The probe is on its way to the first asteroid, the meeting will be held tomorrow, November 1, 2023.
The mission team confirmed that the latest orbit correction maneuver, performed on September 29, put the spacecraft on course for a flyby of the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh. The spacecraft is expected to pass by the asteroid at a distance of approximately 425 km at 12:54 EST.
On October 28, the team sent a final update to the spacecraft, containing the latest information on the spacecraft and the relative status of the asteroid. According to NASA, this data is accurate enough to guide the spacecraft across the approximately 800,000 km that Lucy and Dinkinesh currently share.
About an hour before maximum approach, when the probe is approximately 16,000 km away from the asteroid, Lucy will begin actively tracking Dinkinesh’s position with a tracking system. It will be able to autonomously reorient the probe, which is traveling at about 4.5 m/s, so that the small asteroid remains in the field of view of scientific instruments.
When Lucy approaches Dinkinesh on the morning of November 1, the spacecraft will deploy to a position that will allow it to continuously track the asteroid. This will move the high-gain antenna to Earth and the spacecraft will be able to communicate again until it completes the probe and reorients itself to a location where the antenna is not pointed at Earth. The images and other scientific data will be sent back to Earth in the coming weeks.
A small asteroid located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter only found its name Dinkinesh in February 2023. Dinkinesh will be the first person on the Lucy probe’s intense space tour. Initially, Dinkinesh was not part of the spacecraft’s 12-year tour plan, during which it would visit nine other asteroids. It was only added to the route in January 2023 for the purpose of testing the tracking system. Lucy will return to Earth around 2030 for a third gravitational boost before traveling to a pair of giant asteroids known as Patroclus-Menoetius, reaching them around 2033. Source
Source: Port Altele
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