The spacecraft Lucy of the POT It will pass near a small asteroid this weekend while heading to an even greater prize: the swarms of unexplored asteroids near Jupiter.
It will be the second encounter with an asteroid for Lucy, launched in 2021 on a mission that will take it to 11 space rocks. These nearby approaches should help scientists better understand the beginnings of our solar system, when the planets were being formed. Asteroids are the old remains.
The next overflow is a general essay by 2027, when Lucy reaches her first asteroid of the so -called Trojans near Jupiter.
Activating its three scientific instruments, The probe will observe on Sunday a harmless asteroid known as DonaldjoHanson. The meeting will take place at 223 million kilometers (139 million miles) of the Earth, in the main asteroid belt between Mars And Jupiter, so far that each data bit will take 12 minutes to reach the flight controllers in Colorado.
The paleontologist for whom the asteroid was named —What discovered the fossil Lucy in Ethiopia 50 years ago.It has planned to be in the mission control of Lockheed Martin, which built and operates the spacecraft, to follow all the action. The probe was baptized with the name of the famous human ancestor.
The probe will approach 960 kms (596 miles) of the asteroid, which is estimated to have four kms (2.5 miles) long, but it is much shorter than wide. Scientists should have a better perception of their size and shape after the brief visit. The spacecraft will go to more than 48,000 km/h (30,000 mph).
The asteroid is one of the innumerable fragments that are believed to result from a large collision 150 million years ago.
“It will not be a simple potato. We already know that,” Hal Levison, chief scientist of the Southwest Research Institute said.
According to Levison, the asteroid could resemble a bolus or even a snowman like Perakoth, the Kuiper belt object visited by the NASA New Horizon space probe in 2019. The other possibility is that it is two elongated asteroids but separated from each other.
“We don’t know what to expect. That is what makes this so interesting,” said.
There will be no communications with Lucy during the overflow since the ship will divert its land antenna to follow the asteroid. Levison hopes to have most of the scientific data in one day.
Lucy’s next stop –“The main event”as Levison calls it – they will be the Trojan asteroids who share Jupiter’s orbit around the sun. Trojan swarms precede and follow the largest planet in the solar system while orbit around the star. Lucy will visit eight of them between 2027 and 2033, some of them in couples.
The first overflow of an asteroid made by Lucy was in 2023, when he passed near the little Dinkinesh, also in the main asteroid belt. The ship discovered a mini moon around it.