NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has a new asteroid target

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will add another asteroid encounter to its 4 billion-mile journey. On November 1, 2023, Lucy will take a close-up view of a small main belt asteroid to conduct engineering testing of the spacecraft’s innovative asteroid tracking navigation system.

The Lucy mission is already breaking records and plans to visit nine asteroids during Jupiter’s 12-year tour of the Trojan asteroids that orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. It was originally planned that Lucy would not be able to see the asteroids up close until 2025, when the main belt asteroid (52246) would fly by Donaldjohansson. But the Lucy team has identified a small, as-yet-unnamed asteroid in the inner main belt, designated 1999 VD57, as a potential new and useful target for the Lucy spacecraft (152830).

“There are millions of asteroids in the main asteroid belt,” said Raphael Marshall, a Lucy collaborator at the Nice Observatory in France, who identified the 1999 VD57 asteroid as an object of special interest for Lucy. “I selected 500,000 asteroids with well-defined orbits and saw if Lucy could travel close enough to get a good look at any of them even from afar. This asteroid really stood out. Lucy’s orbit, as originally designed, puts it within 40,000 miles of the asteroid, i.e. a would bring it at least three times closer than the next nearest asteroid.”

During the journey of NASA’s Lucy spacecraft from the inner edge of the main asteroid belt in the fall of 2023, the spacecraft will pass by the small, as-yet-unnamed asteroid (152830) 1999 VD57. This image shows a top-down view of the solar system, showing the orbit of the spacecraft shortly before the November 1 encounter. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Lucy’s team realized that the spacecraft could take a closer look at this asteroid by adding a small maneuver. So, on January 24, the team officially added it to Lucy’s tour as an engineering test of the spacecraft’s pioneering terminal tracking system. This new system will solve a longstanding problem in flight missions: When a spacecraft is approaching an asteroid, it is extremely difficult to accurately determine how far the spacecraft is from the asteroid and in which direction to aim the cameras.

“In the past, most flights took many images of the region where the asteroid might be, which explained this uncertainty, which meant low efficiency and lots of empty space images,” said Hal Levison, Lucy’s chief inspector for the Southwest Region. . Boulder Research Institute, Colorado Office. “Lucy will be the first flight mission to use this innovative and sophisticated system to automatically track an asteroid during an encounter. This new system will allow the team to take much more images of the target.”

The 1999 VD57 proved to be an excellent opportunity to validate this procedure that had never been flown before. The geometry of this encounter, particularly the angle at which the spacecraft approaches the asteroid relative to the Sun, is very similar to the mission’s planned encounters with Trojan asteroids. This allows the team to do a dress rehearsal in similar conditions long before the spacecraft’s main scientific targets.

This asteroid had not previously been identified as a target, as it is extremely small. In fact, 1999 VD57, estimated at 0.4 miles (700 m), would be the smallest main belt asteroid ever visited by a spacecraft. In size, they are much more similar to the near-Earth asteroids visited by NASA’s recent OSIRIS-REx and DART missions than to the main belt asteroids visited previously. The Lucy team will conduct a series of maneuvers from early May 2023 to place the spacecraft on an orbit that will pass within approximately 280 miles (450 km) of the small asteroid.