Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft to visit a bonus asteroid later this year

By

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is currently traveling through the solar system on its way to study the Trojan asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter. The original plan was for the mission to make its first close approach to an asteroid in 2025, but a new plan will see the spacecraft make a flyby of a bonus asteroid later this year.

The asteroid Lucy will pass by is tiny, at just 0.4 miles across, and is currently unnamed — it is referred to by its technical name, 1999 VD57. But it happens to be located close to the path Lucy is taking, and by making small adjustments to the its course Lucy will be able to come even closer.

Illustration of Lucy passing by an asteroid.
Illustration of Lucy passing by an asteroid. NASA

“There are millions of asteroids in the main asteroid belt,” said a member of the Lucy team, Raphael Marschall of the Nice Observatory in France, who picked out the asteroid to be visited. “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.”

Recommended Videos

Lucy will begin making maneuvers in May this year to bring it within just 280 miles of the asteroid when it passes in November 2023. The team hopes that this extra flyby could be useful for checking that they can correctly point the cameras toward it using a new tracking system.

As the NASA Lucy spacecraft travels through the inner edge of the main asteroid belt in the Fall of 2023, the spacecraft will fly by the small, as-of-yet unnamed, asteroid (152830) 1999 VD57. This graphic shows a top-down view of the Solar System indicating the spacecraft's trajectory shortly before the November 1 encounter.
As the NASA Lucy spacecraft travels through the inner edge of the main asteroid belt in the Fall of 2023, the spacecraft will fly by the small, as-of-yet unnamed, asteroid (152830) 1999 VD57. This graphic shows a top-down view of the Solar System indicating the spacecraft’s trajectory shortly before the November 1 encounter. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

“In the past, most flyby missions have accounted for this uncertainty by taking a lot of images of the region where the asteroid might be, meaning low efficiency and lots of images of blank space,” said Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute. “Lucy will be the first flyby mission to employ this innovative and complex system to automatically track the asteroid during the encounter. This novel system will allow the team to take many more images of the target.”

Related

Since its launch, Lucy has had problems with a stuck solar array, and NASA recently announced that it would pause attempts to fully deploy the array as the spacecraft is now traveling away from the sun and getting colder. However, models predict that as the array is 98% deployed it will be strong enough to complete the mission as planned.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
NASA’s axed moon rover could be resurrected by Intuitive Machines
An illustration of NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) on the lunar surface.

Lunar scientists were shocked and dismayed last month when NASA announced that it was canceling work on its moon rover, VIPER. The Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover was intended to search the moon's south pole for evidence of water there, but NASA said that it had to ax the project due to increasing costs.

This week, an open letter to Congress called the cancellation of the mission "unprecedented and indefensible," and questioned NASA's assertion that the cancellation of the mission would not affect plans to send humans to the moon. Scientists argued that the mission was fundamental to understanding the presence of water on the moon, which is a key resource for human exploration, as well as an issue of scientific interest.

Read more
NASA says goodbye to our planetary protector, the asteroid-spotting NEOWISE mission
This artist’s concept depicts the NEOWISE spacecraft in orbit around Earth. Launched in 2009 to survey the entire sky in infrared, the spacecraft took on a more specialized role in 2014 when it was reactivated to study near-Earth asteroids and comets.

Fifteen years after a launch that was intended to begin just a seven month mission, NASA's NEOWISE spacecraft has finally shut down. The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer spacecraft surveyed the sky spotting thousands of asteroids within our solar system, and made discoveries such as a striking comet that as named after it. The spacecraft has made years of scientific observations, but with its orbit slowly dropping, it has now been decommissioned and will burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere later this year.

NEOWISE was a remarkable mission for several reasons, one of which was that it was never intended to be an asteroid observation mission at all. It was originally launched as WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, and looked at distant objects like galaxies in the infrared. Its original mission was successful and so was extended, but within a couple of years the spacecraft had used up the coolant required for some of its detectors and it was put into hibernation.

Read more
Stuck Starliner is causing NASA to delay other ISS missions
SpaceX Crew-9 during training.

NASA has announced that it will delay the targeted launch date of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) while it continues to work on resolving the situation with the troubled Starliner spacecraft.

The Starliner mission was only supposed to last about 10 days, but has been docked at the ISS since early June. An issue with some of the spacecraft's thrusters has prompted NASA engineers to carry out investigations to determine if the vehicle is safe to fly home with its two crew members on board.

Read more