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upstart writes:

NASA’s Lucy mission will soon be in the sky, with a launch set for Saturday:

Less than five years have gone by since NASA selected the "Lucy" mission for development as part of its Discovery Mission program, and now the intriguing spacecraft is ready for launch.

The $981 million mission will fly an extremely complex trajectory over the span of a dozen years. The spacecraft will swing by Earth a total of three times for gravitational assists as it visits a main-belt asteroid, 52246 Donaldjohanson, and subsequently flies by eight Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter's orbit around the Sun.

The Lucy mission is scheduled to launch on Saturday at 5:34 am ET (09:34 UTC) from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. An Atlas V rocket carrying the 1.5-ton spacecraft rolled to the launch pad on Thursday in advance of the launch attempt. The weather looks fine Saturday morning, with a 90 percent chance of favorable conditions. The launch will be covered live on NASA TV.

Lucy will fly by its first asteroid target in April 2025, a main-belt asteroid named after Donald Johanson, the American anthropologist who co-discovered the famed "Lucy" fossil in 1974. The fossil, of a female hominin species that lived about 3.2 million years ago, supported the evolutionary idea that bipedalism preceded an increase in brain size.

[...] No probe has flown by these smallish Trojan asteroids, which are clustered at stable LaGrange points trailing and ahead of Jupiter's orbit 5.2 astronomical units from the Sun. The asteroids are mostly dark but may be covered with tholins, which are organic compounds that could provide raw materials for the basic chemicals of life.

[...] According to Donya Douglas-Bradshaw, Lucy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the pandemic struck during a critical time period when the spacecraft was assembled with its four major scientific payloads. It took about 14 months to integrate the spacecraft bus with the instruments and verify that the craft could survive for a full 12-year mission in space. If Lucy is successful, the mission will travel farther on solar power than any previous spacecraft.

Also at CNN and c|net.

Original Submission

1. "upstart" - https://soylentnews.org/~upstart/
2. "NASA’s Lucy mission will soon be in the sky, with a launch set for Saturday" - https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/nasa-set-to-explore-the-fossils-of-the-solar-system-with-lucy/
3. "CNN" - https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/15/world/lucy-mission-prelaunch-nasa-scn/index.html
4. "c|net" - https://www.cnet.com/news/nasas-lucy-mission-20-minutes-of-terror-will-define-the-next-12-years/
5. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=51970

printed from SoylentNews, NASA's Lucy Mission is Ready to Launch and Explore Never-Before-Seen Asteroids on 2024-04-25 18:00:36