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NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will add another asteroid encounter to its 4-billion-mile journey. On November 1, 2023, lucy will have a close-up view of a small asteroid in the main belt as part of a technical trial of the probe's innovative asteroid tracking navigation system.
The Lucy mission is already breaking records by planning to visit nine asteroids during its 12-year tour of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter. Originally, lucy was not planned to get a close-up view of an asteroid before 2025, when it will fly through the asteroid's main belt (52246) donaldjohanson. However, Lucy's team identified an unnamed small asteroid in the interior main belt, designated (152830) 1999 VD57, as a new and useful potential target for the Lucy spaceship.
"There are millions of asteroids in the major asteroid belt," declared Raphael Marschall, Lucy is a contributor to the Observatoire de Nice in France, which identified asteroid 1999 VD57 as something of particular interest to Lucy. 'I've selected 500,000 asteroids with well-defined orbits to see if Lucy could travel close enough to get a good glimpse of one, even remotely. That asteroid has truly made a name for itself. Lucy's course, as originally designed, will be less than 40,000 miles from the asteroid, at least three times closer to the nearest asteroid."
While NASA's Lucy probe crosses the interior edge of the main asteroid belt in autumn 2023, The spaceship will fly through the little one, as-of-yet unnamed, asteroid (152830) 1999 VD 57. This graph shows a top-down view of the solar system showing the trajectory of the probe just before the November 1st meeting. Source: Goddard Space Flight Center at NASA.
Lucy's team realized that adding a small manoeuvre would allow the spacecraft to get a closer look at this asteroid. So, on January 24th, the team officially added it to Lucy's tour as a technical test of the pioneering tracking system for the probe's terminals. The new system solves a longstanding problem with overflight missions: when an asteroid is approaching by a spaceship, It's pretty hard to determine exactly how close the spaceship is to the asteroid, and exactly where the cameras should be.
"Once upon a time.", most overflight missions have taken this uncertainty into account by taking many images of the area where the asteroid may be located, that is to say low efficiency and many empty space images," said hal levison, lucy senior researcher of the rock of the south-west research institute, colorado office. 'Lucy will be the first fly-past mission to use this innovative and complex system to automatically follow the asteroid at the event. With this new system, the team will be able to capture a lot more images of the target."
As it turns out, the 1999 VD57 offers a great opportunity to validate this unprecedented procedure. The geometry of this encounter, especially the angle at which the spacecraft approaches the asteroid from the sun, is very similar to the trojan asteroid encounters predicted by the mission. This enables the team to conduct a dress rehearsal under similar conditions well in advance of the main scientific targets of the craft.
This asteroid was not previously identified as a target because it is extremely small. 1999 vd57, estimated at just 0.4 miles (700 m), will be the smallest asteroid in the main belt ever visited by any spaceship. It is much more similar in size to the near-Earth asteroids visited by recent NASA missions OSIRIS-REx and DART than to previously visited main belt asteroids.
The Lucy team will carry out a series of maneuvers starting in early May 2023 to place the spacecraft on a trajectory that will pass approximately 280 miles (450 km) from this small asteroid.
Lucy’s principal investigator is based out of the Boulder, Colorado branch of Southwest Research Institute, headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Lucy is NASA's 13th discovery project mission. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
