NASA's Lucy Probe Phones Home From 49-Million-Mile Journey to Asteroid
The main belt asteroid appears as a small speck among a field of stars.
The Lucy spacecraft is on a 12-year journey to visit eight different asteroids, and it’s almost caught up with the first space rock on its checklist.
Since it launched in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy mission has trekked through over 33 million miles (54 million kilometers) in space. The spacecraft is now 4.7 million miles (7.6 million km) away from its first target, a small asteroid named Dinikinesh. As the asteroid orbits around the Sun, however, Lucy needs to travel another 16 million miles (25 million kilometers) to finally rendezvous with Dinikinesh on November 1, according to NASA.
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Lucy went through a brief communications blackout from October 6 until mid-October as the spacecraft passed behind the Sun as viewed from Earth. During that time, the mission was still diligently capturing images of the asteroid, which will be sent to Earth once communication with Lucy is reestablished.
Dinikinesh is a tiny space rock in the main asteroid belt, only about a half-mile wide (1 kilometer). The asteroid was recently added to the mission’s itinerary as a way to test the spacecraft’s terminal tracking system, which is used for precise imaging during its high speed encounters with the asteroids.
Lucy will begin its tour of the Trojan asteroids in 2027 by visiting Eurybates and its binary partner Queta, followed by Polymele and its binary partner, Leucus, Orus, and the binary pair Patroclus and Menoetius. The Trojans are a group of asteroids that lead and follow Jupiter as it orbits around the Sun.
The mission is named after the famous Australopithecine fossil found in 1974, while Dinikinesh, or ድንቅነሽ in Amharic, is the Ethiopian name for the human-ancestor fossil that’s also known as Lucy. The asteroid was discovered in 1999 but was left unnamed until it was selected as a target for the mission in January.
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