When we last looked in on Lucy in October 2021, the team was dealing with an undervolt issue, since one of the two circular shaped, fanning solar arrays hadn't locked fully into place -- it was at about 340 degrees, of an expected 360 degrees. NASA has since decided to fly with it, as is -- as it has plenty of electrical power for all mission operations as is.
Here a full year later, Lucy has just caught a gravity assist slinghshot of a ride past Earth -- which it will do once again next in late 2024, before reaching the belts of objects ahead of Jupiter, in that far-flung orbit. Here's the latest, from NASA and Boulder's SwRI:
. . .“The last time we saw the spacecraft, it was being enclosed in the payload fairing in Florida,” said Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Boulder, Colorado office. “It is exciting that we will be able to stand here in Colorado and see the spacecraft again. And this time Lucy will be in the sky.”
Lucy will then rapidly recede from the Earth’s vicinity, passing by the Moon and taking a few more calibration images before continuing out into interplanetary space.
“I’m especially excited by the final few images that Lucy will take of the Moon,” said John Spencer, acting deputy project scientist at SwRI. “Counting craters to understand the collisional history of the Trojan asteroids is key to the science that Lucy will carry out, and this will be the first opportunity to calibrate Lucy’s ability to detect craters by comparing it to previous observations of the Moon by other space missions. . . .”
Now you know -- onward, grinning.
नमस्ते
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