Jan. 9, 2020NASA’s Lucy Mission Confirms Discovery of Eurybates SatelliteNASA’s Lucy mission team is seeing double after discovering that Eurybates, the asteroid the spacecraft has targeted for flyby in 2027, has a small satellite. This “bonus” science exploration opportunity for the project was discovered using images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 in September 2018, December 2019, and January 2020....“This newly discovered satellite is more than 6,000 times fainter than Eurybates, implying a diameter less than 1 km,” said Southwest Research Institute’s Hal Levison, principal investigator of the mission. “If this estimate proves to be correct, it will be among the smallest asteroids visited.”Eurybates was first observed with Hubble in a search for small satellites in 2018, but it wasn’t until this past November when a Lucy team member noticed something in the data indicating a possible satellite.“We asked for more Hubble time to confirm, and they gave us three tries,” said Keith Noll, Lucy project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-discoverer of the satellite. The team was quick to make the first set of confirmation observations in December and early January. The possible satellite was hard to see and moving on an unknown orbit around the much brighter Eurybates. There was no guarantee that it would be visible in the new images. “In the first two observations in December we didn’t see anything, so we began to think we might be unlucky. But on the third orbit, there it was,” said Noll.The team is working with Hubble schedulers to decide when to make the next observations after Eurybates becomes observable again. Due to the orbits of Earth and Eurybates, and because Hubble cannot be pointed toward the Sun, further observations are not possible until June. In the meantime, the team is using current observation data to study the satellite’s orbit around the asteroid, which will help scientists determine the best times for observations.While there is no impact to the spacecraft architecture or schedule, the project team is carefully planning how to safely examine the new satellite while ensuring the mission’s requirement to study Eurybates is fully met....“There are only a handful of known Trojan asteroids with satellites, and the presence of a satellite is particularly interesting for Eurybates,” said Thomas Statler, Lucy Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “It’s the largest member of the only confirmed Trojan collisional family – roughly 100 asteroids all traceable to, and probably fragments from, the same collision.”The opportunity to study a prospective collisional satellite at close range will help our fundamental understanding of collisions, which Statler says may be responsible for the formation of satellites in other small body populations....
Aug. 28, 2020NASA’s Lucy Mission One Step Closer to Exploring the Trojan AsteroidsNASA’s first mission to explore the Trojan asteroids is one step closer to launch. The Discovery Program’s Lucy mission passed a critical milestone and is officially authorized to transition to its next phase.This major decision was made after a series of independent reviews of the status of the spacecraft, instruments, schedule and budget. The milestone, known as Key Decision Point-D (KDP-D), represents the official transition from the mission’s development stage to delivery of components, testing, assembly and integration leading to launch. During this part of the mission’s life cycle, known as Phase D, the spacecraft bus (the structure that will carry the science instruments) is completed, the instruments are integrated into the spacecraft and tested, and the spacecraft is shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for integration with the launch vehicle.“Each phase of the mission is more exciting than the last,” says Lucy Principal Investigator Hal Levison of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, CO. “While, of course, Lucy still has several years and a few billion miles to go before we reach our real goal – exploring the never-before-seen Trojan asteroids – seeing this spacecraft come together is just incredible.”...The oxidizer tank has already been integrated with the spacecraft, and the instrument integration starts in October. All spacecraft assembly and testing will be completed by the end of July 2021, when the spacecraft will be shipped to Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida in preparation for the launch window opening on October 16, 2021. After launch, Lucy will have a long cruise phase before it arrives at its first target. Lucy is flying out to the distance of Jupiter to make close fly-bys past a record-breaking number of asteroids, encountering the first of eight targets in April 2025 and the final binary pair of asteroids in March 2033.The next major milestone is the Mission Operation Review, scheduled in October 2020, which assesses the project's operational readiness and its progress towards launch.Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, is the principal investigator institution for Lucy. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space near Denver is building the spacecraft and will perform spacecraft flight operations. Instruments will be provided by Goddard, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and Arizona State University.
Is there any chance that, on a mission extension, Lucy might fly by 624 Hektor?
Quote from: whitelancer64 on 11/26/2020 02:15 amIs there any chance that, on a mission extension, Lucy might fly by 624 Hektor?I don't know about it flying by 624 Hektor, but in the press conference announcing the selection of Lucy and Psyche, the Lucy PI said that the team had looked at extended mission options, and one included a flyby of the Psyche asteroid (now, obviously no longer needed).Lucy could be the mission that just keeps giving. I presume that the limiting factor is fuel for the targeted flybys; there could be a number of flybys past the prime mission.
Quote from: redliox on 11/26/2020 10:12 pmQuote from: vjkane on 11/26/2020 03:03 pmQuote from: whitelancer64 on 11/26/2020 02:15 amIs there any chance that, on a mission extension, Lucy might fly by 624 Hektor?I don't know about it flying by 624 Hektor, but in the press conference announcing the selection of Lucy and Psyche, the Lucy PI said that the team had looked at extended mission options, and one included a flyby of the Psyche asteroid (now, obviously no longer needed).Lucy could be the mission that just keeps giving. I presume that the limiting factor is fuel for the targeted flybys; there could be a number of flybys past the prime mission.I'd love to see a Hektor flyby, in part because it was the first binary/contact asteroid discovered and how it remains the largest known Trojan. I keep forgetting which Trojan cloud it's part of although I think the "Greek camp."Hektor was the Prince of Troy, killed by the Greek Achilles.
Quote from: vjkane on 11/26/2020 03:03 pmQuote from: whitelancer64 on 11/26/2020 02:15 amIs there any chance that, on a mission extension, Lucy might fly by 624 Hektor?I don't know about it flying by 624 Hektor, but in the press conference announcing the selection of Lucy and Psyche, the Lucy PI said that the team had looked at extended mission options, and one included a flyby of the Psyche asteroid (now, obviously no longer needed).Lucy could be the mission that just keeps giving. I presume that the limiting factor is fuel for the targeted flybys; there could be a number of flybys past the prime mission.I'd love to see a Hektor flyby, in part because it was the first binary/contact asteroid discovered and how it remains the largest known Trojan. I keep forgetting which Trojan cloud it's part of although I think the "Greek camp."
