Lucy Mission : Successfully Completed Its First Flyby Of An Asteroid
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft successfully completed its first flyby of an asteroid named Dinkinesh.
- Lucy Mission is a first-of-its-kind mission of NASA that will explore Jupiter’s elusive Trojan asteroids.
- Trojan Asteroids occupy a stable Lagrangian point in a planet’s orbit around the Sun.
- They are some of the oldest remnants from the formation of our solar system5 billion years ago.
- It was successfully launched on October 16, 2021, from the Kennedy Space Centrein Florida, US.
- Over its 12-year mission, Lucy will explore a record-breaking number of asteroids: it will fly by two in the belt of asteroids that circle the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and then 10 Trojans, which includes five asteroid targets and the satellites of three of those.
- Lucy will also fly by Earth three times to get a push from its gravity, making it the first spacecraft to return to the vicinity of Earth from the outer solar system.
- The spacecraft carries two infrared spectrometers and four cameras.
