NASA’s asteroid-hopping Lucy mission is lastly getting fired up in house for its journey to the never-before-explored Trojan asteroids, which observe Jupiter because it orbits the solar.
On Wednesday (Jan. 31), the Lucy spacecraft will fireplace its primary engines off-Earth for the primary time since its launch in Aug. 2021. The firing of Lucy’s primary engines will see the spacecraft burn via round half of its onboard gas. This will probably be adopted by a second, bigger maneuver, which NASA says is at the moment set for Saturday (Feb. 3).
The purpose of those two early 2024 operations is to alter Lucy’s velocity by round 2,000 miles per hour (3,217 kilometers per hour.)
Prior to those two maneuvers, the spacecraft had undergone most shifts in velocity of round 10 mph (16 kph), however these had been sufficiently small to be achieved by the spacecraft’s secondary, much less highly effective thrusters.
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Following these maneuvers, the subsequent main milestone for Lucy will probably be a flyby of Earth in Dec. 2024, at which period the spacecraft will get a second gravity help from our planet that’ll hopefully slingshot it onto a brand new trajectory. Lucy will come as shut as 230 miles (370 kilometers) to the Earth throughout this flyby.
Particularly, the mixture of those 2024 maneuvers will shift the spacecraft from its present orbit of the solar, which simply skims the principle asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and allowed it to go to the tiny asteroid Dinkinesh, or ‘Dinky’ on Nov. 1, 2023. Within the means of doing this, Lucy helped NASA scientists uncover Dinky is definitely a double (double-double, in a approach) asteroid system.
The resultant new orbit of Lucy will carry the spacecraft out previous the principle asteroid belt. Throughout this passage, Lucy will take the chance to go to the small primary asteroid belt physique 52246 Donaldjohanson in April 2025.
After this, Lucy will probably be on observe towards Jupiter and to the area of the Trojans, which share the fuel big’s orbit across the solar. The Trojans are organized in two unfastened teams, with one set barely forward of the fuel big, the Greek camp, and one other behind it, the Trojan camp.
Lucy will go to the Greek camp of Trojan asteroids first, setting its sights on the asteroid Eurybates and its satellite tv for pc or ‘moonlet’ Queta in August 2027.
After this, the spacecraft will fly previous one other 4 Trojan asteroids and three extra moonlets, finally making a remaining go to to Earth in 2031 earlier than the Lucy mission attracts to an in depth in 2033.
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