Professor Carly Howett, Tutorial Fellow in Physics at St Edmund Hall and the lead of the instrument Ralph on NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, shares an update below:
“On Wednesday 1 November NASA’s Lucy had its first asteroid flyby!
Since we last checked in with the launch a couple years ago, the Lucy mission has done an orbit around Earth, checked out instruments looking at the Earth and the Moon during an Earth Gravity Assist, and is preparing for its flyby encounters of the Trojan Asteroids starting in 2027 that lead and trail Jupiter in its orbit. Lucy will gather information that will tell us more about the ingredients that made up planets across the solar system and the remnants from that process.
We had a surprise this year where the program discovered a new asteroid (Dinkinish) that is on the Lucy orbit! It was a bit of a scramble, but we took advantage of the opportunity to test out the Lucy asteroid flyby encounter processes and systems several years prior to the first planned asteroid encounter! The team rose to the challenge of planning another encounter, and are now ready for this fortuitous event! Results should start being released after encounter ~5pm UK , but in reality it will be later in the day or the following days when details will be shared.”
