NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is getting ready for an exciting encounter. Its next target is the small asteroid named Donaldjohanson. This animation shows how quickly Lucy is closing in on the asteroid, based on images taken on February 20 and 22. You can see how Donaldjohanson moves against the backdrop of stars as the spacecraft approaches.
On April 20, Lucy will fly within 596 miles (960 km) of the 2-mile-wide asteroid. This will be the spacecraft’s second encounter and an important practice run for its main mission: exploring Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. In November 2023, Lucy successfully observed another tiny asteroid called Dinkinesh, along with its moon, Selam. Over the next two months, Lucy will gather more images of Donaldjohanson to help with its navigation. This process involves tracking the asteroid’s position against the stars to ensure a precise flyby.
Initially, Donaldjohanson will just look like a faint dot of light as Lucy approaches. It won’t reveal any surface details until the day of the flyby. From 45 million miles away (70 million km), the asteroid is dim compared to the other stars in the constellation Sextans. The view from this distance covers 85,500 miles (140,000 km), just enough to see other distant objects nearby. In one of the images, you can spot another faint asteroid in the corner, but during the approach, Donaldjohanson will seem almost stationary compared to that interloper.
Lucy’s observations are made using its high-resolution camera called L’LORRI, which stands for Lucy Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. This instrument is developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.
The name Donaldjohanson honors the anthropologist who discovered the famous fossil named “Lucy,” which is also the namesake of NASA’s mission. Hal Levison, the principal investigator for the mission, operates from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center oversees the overall mission, while Lockheed Martin Space built the spacecraft. Lucy is part of NASA’s broader Discovery Program, which the Marshall Space Flight Center manages.
If you want to dive deeper into NASA’s Lucy mission, there’s more information available on their official website.
Check out this related article: Catch the Spectacular Planetary Alignment in February’s Night Sky: A Celestial Show You Can’t Miss!
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