![An artist’s conception of the Lucy spacecraft flying by a Trojan asteroid.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/lucy3-1-800x646.jpg)
NASA
Somewhat greater than two years have passed for the reason that Lucy mission launched on an Atlas V rocket, ultimately sure for asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter. After a gravity assist from Earth in 2022, the spacecraft has been making a beeline for an intermediate goal, and now it is almost there.
On Wednesday, the $1 billion mission is resulting from make its first asteroid flyby, coming to inside 265 miles (425 km) of the small most important belt asteroid Dinkinesh. In a blog post, NASA says the encounter will happen at 12:54 pm ET (16:54 UTC).
About an hour before the encounter, the spacecraft will begin attempting to lock on to the small asteroid in order that its instruments are oriented toward it. This can allow for the most effective possible position to take data from Dinkinesh as Lucy speeds by at 10,000 mph (4,470 meters per second).
During this maneuver, Lucy’s most important antenna will probably be pointed away from Earth, so it should not be in communication with its operators at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. After the flyby, Lucy will reorient itself to reestablish communications with Earth through the Deep Space Network. Imagery and other data will probably be relayed back to Earth for several subsequent days.
What’s in a reputation?
That is a vital flyby for Lucy for several reasons. To start with, it’s the primary real test of the spacecraft’s tracking system. If this fails, the asteroid will probably be little greater than a blur as Lucy zips by.
Symbolically, the asteroid flyby can be significant. Lucy, the spacecraft, is called after the Lucy hominin fossils present in 1974 in Ethiopia. These fossils of the species are critical to our understanding of human evolution and helped scientists determine that our ability to walk on two legs preceded the rise in brain size that’s certainly one of the dominant characteristics of contemporary humans.
The NASA mission will study “Trojan” asteroids that share the identical orbit as Jupiter. Scientists consider these asteroids are remnants of the era of planet formation within the Solar System and are due to this fact akin to fossils. Hence, the name Lucy for this mission.
Dinkinesh, which is almost a kilometer across at its widest point, was discovered in 1999. It was unnamed when the Lucy mission targeted it for its first flyby as a test of the tracking system, en path to the Jovian trojan asteroids later this decade. So, Lucy mission scientists proposed the name Dinkinesh, the Ethiopian name for the Lucy fossils.
It was approved earlier this 12 months by the International Astronomical Union.