On Nov. 1, NASA confirmed its Lucy spacecraft successfully accomplished a flyby of asteroid Dinkinesh, a comparatively small space rock positioned within the essential belt between Mars and Jupiter. This marks a milestone in Lucy’s journey, as Dinkinesh, or ‘Dinky,’ is the primary of 10 asteroids the probe will visit over the following 12 years.
“Based on the knowledge received, the team has determined that the spacecraft is in good health,” NASA officials wrote in a blog post after the flyby occurred. “The team has commanded the spacecraft to start out downlinking the information collected through the encounter.”
In a nutshell, the Lucy mission is a component of NASA’s ambitious endeavor to unveil secrets of our solar system’s past. Though Lucy can even be passing by just a few relatively nearby asteroids like Dinky, the probe’s essential goal is to fly by just a few more distant Trojan asteroids orbiting the sun alongside Jupiter like bundles of pebbles sure to the gravitational tides of an enormous boulder. Scientists are curious about learning more about those Trojans because they’re believed to be ancient relics of the solar system, like extra Lego bricks from the box that built the planets.
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Lucy’s flyby of Dinkinesh could be regarded as a test-run on this regard, as lots of the spacecraft’s instruments have now been oiled while collecting data about this primary asteroid encounter — including a color imager, high-resolution camera and infrared spectrometer.
In keeping with the blog post, data from these tools will take about per week to be downlinked to Earth, and the team is “looking forward to seeing how the spacecraft performed during this primary in-flight test of a high-speed asteroid encounter.”
Next, Lucy will head back to Earth for a gravity assist that’ll help it zoom toward its second asteroid goal: 52246 Donaldjohanson — named after co-discoverer of the Lucy fossil (representative of 1 the earliest human ancestors, for which the spacecraft is called), American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson. And should you were wondering, “Dinkinesh” is just one other title for the Lucy fossil.
It also means “you might be marvelous,” as you might be, Lucy.