NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Completes First Flyby, Begins Epic Journey to Jupiter’s Trojans

On Wednesday, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft made its first stop on its long journey to Jupiter, flying by the asteroid Dinkinesh in the main asteroid belt beyond Mars. According to NASA, the spacecraft zoomed by at 10,000 mph, coming within 270 miles of the half-mile-wide asteroid, providing a dry run for the more significant and alluring asteroids ahead.

Lucy’s encounter with Dinkinesh marked the end of what NASA calls Asteroid Autumn, a period of intense asteroid study. The spacecraft had earlier returned samples of rubble from an asteroid in September, and just a few weeks prior, NASA had launched a spacecraft to a rare, metal-rich asteroid named Psyche. In contrast, Lucy will not stop at any asteroids or collect any samples; its job is to provide a detailed look at the Trojans, swarms of unexplored asteroids near Jupiter that are considered time capsules from the dawn of the solar system.

Located about 300 million miles away, Dinkinesh is considered one of the smallest asteroids on Lucy’s tour. The spacecraft will swing past eight Trojans, believed to be up to 10 to 100 times bigger than Dinkinesh, before it zips past the final two asteroids in 2033. The Lucy spacecraft is named after the 3.2 million-year-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia in the 1970s.

After the flyby, the engineers will command Lucy to send science data from the Dinkinesh encounter to Earth, a process that will take several days. Although one of Lucy’s two solar wings remains loose, a problem that has been reported earlier, it is believed to be stable enough for the entire mission. The data downlink will provide a wealth of information about Dinkinesh, which has only been seen as an unresolved smudge in the best telescopes, according to Southwest Research Institute’s Hal Levison, the lead scientist.

Lucy will take at least a week to send back all its pictures and data from the flyby. Its next stop will be an asteroid named after one of Lucy’s discoverers, Donald Johanson, marking the beginning of a new phase in the spacecraft’s journey.