It’s been a year since NASA launched. lucy spaceship During a mission to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. On Sunday, Lucy will wave to Earth for the first time during a brief but potentially dangerous rendezvous.In the unlikely event of a collision, the mission her team will be able to move spacecraft from satellites and spacecraft to space. are prepared to protect the
On Lucy’s first flyby to Earth, the rover will reach just 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the surface, according to NASA. statementThat’s less than the 254 miles (408 kilometers) that separate the International Space Station from the ground. According to NASA, this layer of low Earth orbit is packed with more than 47,000 satellites, space debris, and other objects spinning around the Earth at high speed, making it a safe place for a lone spacecraft. There is none.
To protect Lucy, NASA engineers have been analyzing the possibility of a spacecraft collision a week before the planned flyby. It may look close, but the closer the collision assessment is to the flyby, the better the prediction. “The more we predict the future, the more uncertainty we have about where objects will go,” said Doran Highsmith, chief engineer for the Conjunction Assessment and Risk Analysis Group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement. increases.
The team is trying to predict the position of the Lucy spacecraft during the flyby, as well as the positions of surrounding objects. Where these objects will be in the future also depends on the activity of the Sun. Our star shoots plasma and radiation into space, which densifies the atmosphere and pulls and slows down spacecraft.
The crash assessment team sends Lucy’s location to the Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron, which monitors objects in low Earth orbit. The team is ready to perform a turn maneuver if Lucy’s chance of colliding with another object is greater than 1 in 10,000 of hers. “With a high-value mission like this, you have to make sure you have the ability to get out of the way in the worst case,” Highsmith said.
Lucy’s navigation engineers provided two maneuvers to change the closest approach time to another object by 2 or 4 seconds in case the spacecraft needed to move out of the way. “It’s a small fix, but it’s enough to avoid a potentially catastrophic collision,” said Coralie Adam, her chief of Lucy’s side-navigation team at KinetX Aerospace. I’m here. statementThese two maneuvers require the engines to fire to accelerate the spacecraft as it moves past Earth at a speed of about 8 miles (12 km) per second.
Flyby becomes Lucy’s first gravity assist, using Earth to place the spacecraft in a new orbit beyond that of Mars. Lucy appears to be approaching our planet from the direction of the Sun, making it invisible to observers from Earth prior to its planned flyby. However, at around 6:55 am on October 16th, Lucy is visible to people in Western Australia before disappearing into the shadows of the Earth. According to NASA, the rover will resurface at 7:26 a.m. ET, and observers in the western United States may be able to catch a glimpse of Lucy through binoculars. During her flyby, Lucy takes pictures of the Earth and the Moon. These images help mission her scientists calibrate Lucy’s equipment.
The new orbit will place Lucy in a two-year orbit around the Sun, at the end of which Lucy will return to Earth for yet another gravitational assistance. From there, Lucy still has about three. A few more years until we reach our first target, the asteroid Donald Johansson.later iIn August 2027, Lucy launches a Trojan tour by visiting Eurybates and its binary partner Queta, visiting Polymele and its binary partners Leucus, Orus, and the binary pair Patroclus and Menoetius .
The Trojan asteroids are two groups of rocky bodies orbiting the Sun, one leading in front of Jupiter and one trailing behind it.These cosmic rocks are held by the balancing act of gravity It lies between Jupiter and the Sun and is thought to be remnants of primitive matter that formed the exoplanets. Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit the Trojan Horse, potentially unlocking the mysteries of how the outer planets of our solar system formed billions of years ago.
“The last time we saw the spacecraft, it was trapped in a payload fairing in Florida,” said Hal Levison, principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). I’m thrilled to be able to see the again, and this time Lucy is in the sky.”
more: Astronomers track shadows from Jupiter’s mysterious Trojan asteroids
