The craft will have imaged something much smaller, in a much shorter duration "whiz-by". . . with cameras designed for the task. That way any adjustments can be made, if needed, prior to actual science ops.
And while we wait a week for the actual downloads, that day we mentioned in January has now arrived, here in November. Here is the story, from the ops. team at NASA:
. . .The Lucy operations team has confirmed that NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has phoned home after its encounter with the small main belt asteroid, Dinkinesh. Based on the information received, the team has determined that the spacecraft is in good health and the team has commanded the spacecraft to start downlinking the data collected during the encounter. It will take up to a week for all the data collected during the encounter to be downlinked to Earth. . . .
[Earlier blog entry: Lucy's] first close up look at the small inner-main belt asteroid, Dinkinesh [occurred this week]. Dinkinesh is 10 to 100 times smaller than the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that are the mission’s main targets. The Dinkinesh encounter serves as a first in-flight test of the spacecraft’s terminal tracking system.
Lucy’s closest approach [came] on November 1, at 12:54 p.m. EDT (16:54 UTC) at a distance within 270 miles (430 km) of Dinkinesh. However, there [wasn't] much time to observe the asteroid at this distance as Lucy sped past at 10,000 mph (4.5 km/s). . . .
Onward. . . grinning into a perfect "fall back" sunny Sunday morning -- the extra pillow time is always. . . welcome!
नमस्ते
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