NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will zoom past asteroids at 30,000 miles this weekend. “I don’t know what to expect.”

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will be an even bigger prize this weekend as it passes a small asteroid. An unexplored flock of asteroids near Jupiter.

It will be Lucy’s second asteroid encounter, Released in 2021 In a quest to take it to 11 space rocks. In November 2023, Lucy managed to “call” NASA Fast encounter With an asteroid called Dinkinesh.

A close approach should help scientists better understand the early solar system when planets are forming. Asteroids are ancient leftovers.

The upcoming flyby is a 2027 dress rehearsal in which Lucy reached the first so-called Trojan asteroid near Jupiter.

Sunday’s spacecraft, making three scientific instruments, observes a harmless asteroid known as Donald Johansson. The encounter takes place 139 million miles from Earth, the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and so far takes 12 minutes for each data to reach the Colorado flight controller.

A paleontologist named Lockheed Martin, the asteroid, the architect and operator of the spacecraft, is in mission control for all actions. He discovered Ethiopian fossil Lucy 50 years ago. The spaceship is named after a famous human ancestor.

NASA’s Lucy is close to 596 miles on this asteroid, estimated to be 2.5 miles long, but much shorter in width. Scientists should consider their size and shape better after a short visit. The spacecraft zooms at over 30,000 mph.

The asteroid is one of countless fragments believed to have arisen from a massive collision 150 million years ago.

“It’s not going to be a basic potato. We already know that,” said Hal Levison, the lead scientist at the Southwest Research Institute.

Rather, Levison said the asteroid could resemble bowling pins and snowmen like Arocos, the Kuiper Belt object that NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft visits in 2019. Another possibility is that two elongated but separate asteroids are far apart.

“We don’t know what to expect, and that’s what makes this so cool,” he said.

There is no communication with Lucy during the flyby as the spacecraft is keeping its antenna away from Earth to track the asteroid. Levison expects to have most of the scientific data within a day.

Unlike the first flyby, NASA said Lucy will stop tracking Donald Johansson 40 seconds before the closest approach to protect the instrument from sunlight.

“If you’re sitting on an asteroid watching Lucy’s spaceship approach, you’ll have to protect your eyes staring at the sun while you wait for Lucy to come out of Glare. You’ll need to overturn your posture once Lucy passes the asteroid.

Lucy’s next stop, “Main Event,” will become a Trojan asteroid, which shares orbit around the Jupiter’s Sun, as Levison calls it. A herd of Trojans preceded the largest planet in the solar system, circles the sun. Lucy visited eight people from 2027 to 2033, some of which will be paired with two.

The spaceship is named after a 3.2 million-year-old skeletal ruin found in Ethiopia, which was named after the 1967 Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” This led NASA to stand up to space, with band members’ lyrics and words of wisdom from other famous people engraved on the plaque. The spacecraft also carried discs made of lab-grown diamonds as one of its scientific instruments.

more