The probe will conduct a close flyby of asteroid Dinkinesh on Wednesday to test its instruments as it steadily makes its way towards Jupiter's Trojan asteroids.
After traveling millions of miles over the past two years, the Lucy spacecraft has almost reached its first destination.
’s asteroid probe will briefly rendezvous with Dinkinesh in the main asteroid belt on Wednesday to prepare for its future visits of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. The spacecraft will make its closest approach to the astroid at a distance of approximately 265 miles at 12:54 p.m. E.T on November 1, according to
. “This is the first time Lucy will be getting a close look at an object that, up to this point, has only been an unresolved smudge in the best telescopes,” Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement. “Dinkinesh is about to be revealed to humanity for the first time.” Lucy has been visually tracking Dinkinesh since September 3.
. “We’ll know what the spacecraft should be doing at all times, but Lucy is so far away it takes about 30 minutes for radio signals to travel between the spacecraft and Earth, so we can’t command an asteroid encounter interactively,” Mark Effertz, Lucy chief engineer at Lockheed Martin Space, said in a statement. “Instead, we pre-program all the science observations.” After Wednesday’s flyby, Lucy will continue to image and track Dinkinesh for about another hour.
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