Sort Of Like Opening Off-Broadway, In "Previews"... "Lucy" Will Get A Early Look -- At A ~700 Meter Asteroid, By November 4, 2023...

Due to some nifty calculations worked out by Raphael Marschall, a Lucy collaborator at the Nice Observatory in France (see image -- but if I remember correctly, he was the first to spot an interstellar visitor, in 2019, as well), the NASA team has given a green-light, to adjust the trajectory, ever so slightly -- starting in May 2023, so that the lithe lil' craft might send us imagery a full year early, of at least one asteroid of interest by November 4, 2023. Cool!

[My prior backgrounder, on the NASA /SWRI Boulder Lucy mission here.]

Although it will mostly be a demonstration of the new techniques for accurately capturing close up images of very small asteroids, we are likely to get some real "Mr. DeMille close ups" from this encounter. That is, we are likely to beam back high res photographic images of it -- from a distance of only about 280 miles. Whoosh. . . .

The rock involved is under a half mile in size, and is (in the prose of Norman Maclean) "from the basement of time," itself. It was almost certainly formed of the ancient primordial dust. . . not long after our local disk began to accrete matter, into larger clumps. . . so perhaps over 6 billion years ago. It is, quite literally, early star stuff. Here's the SWRI Boulder / NASA story:

. . .“There are millions of asteroids in the main asteroid belt,” said Raphael Marschall, Lucy collaborator of the Nice Observatory in France, who identified asteroid 1999 VD57 as an object of special interest for Lucy. “I selected 500,000 asteroids with well-defined orbits to see if Lucy might be traveling close enough to get a good look at any of them, even from a distance. This asteroid really stood out. Lucy’s trajectory as originally designed will take it within 40,000 miles of the asteroid, at least three times closer than the next closest asteroid. . . .”

This asteroid was not identified as a target earlier because it is extremely small. In fact, 1999 VD57, estimated to be a mere 0.4 miles (700 m) in size, will be the smallest main belt asteroid ever visited by a spacecraft. It is. . . 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. . . .

We will await this particular day, in November of 2023. . . with much excitement, indeed. Grin. Snow ending; some sunshine emerging here, now.

नमस्ते