This image of the video animation provided by NASA in October 2022 represents the spacecraft Lucy. Credit: NASA via AP
Lucy Space de la Nasa will pass a small asteroid this weekend while heading for an even larger price: the unexplored swarms of asteroids near Jupiter.
It will be the second asteroid meeting for Lucy, launched in 2021 on a quest that will prevail at 11 space rocks. Nearby approaches should help scientists better understand our early solar system when planets were formed; Asteroids are the ancient remains.
The next Flyby is a dress rehearsal for 2027 when Lucy reaches her first so-called Trojan asteroid near Jupiter.
Lifting its three scientific instruments, the spaceship on Sunday will observe the harmless asteroid known as Donaldjohanson. The meeting will take place at 139 million miles (223 million kilometers) of the earth in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, so far, it will take 12 minutes for each piece of data to reach the flight controllers in Colorado.
The paleontologist for which the asteroid is named plans to be in the manufacturer of spaceships and the control of the mission of Lockheed Martin for all the action. He discovered the Fossil Lucy in Ethiopia 50 years ago; The spacecraft bears the name of the famous human ancestor.
Lucy de la Nasa will venture as close as 596 miles (960 kilometers) to this asteroid, about 2 ½ miles (4 kilometers) in length but much shorter in width. Scientists should have a better idea of its size and shape after the brief visit. The spacecraft will zoom over 30,000 MPH (48,000 km / h).
The asteroid is one of countless fragments that would have resulted from a large collision 150 million years ago.
“It will not be a fundamental potato. We already know it,” said the main scientist Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute.
On the contrary, Levison said that the asteroid can look like a bowling bowling or even a snowman like Arokoth, the object of the Kuiper belt visited by the NASA New Horizon Spacecraft in 2019. The other possibility is that there are two elongated but separated asteroids.
“We don’t know what to expect. This is what makes this so cool,” he said.
There will be no communication with Lucy during the overview while the spacecraft removes its antenna from the earth to follow the asteroid. Levison plans to have most scientific data in one day.
Lucy’s next judgment – “the main event”, as Levison will call it – will be the Trojan asteroids who share Jupiter’s orbit around the sun. Ships of Trojan horses precede and follow the largest planet in the solar system when it goes around the sun. Lucy will visit eight from 2027 to 2033, some of which are in pairs of two.
The first overview of Lucy’s asteroids was in 2023 when he swept the little Dinkineh, also in the main asteroid belt. The spacecraft discovered a mini moon around it.
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