Pushed for a 12-year reconnaissance mission, NASA’s science probe Lucy will launch Oct. 16 from Florida’s Space Coast to embark on a journey through the solar system to visit eight asteroids, a record number for a single spacecraft.
The ground team last month completed testing of the Lucy spacecraft in an air-conditioned clean room at Astrotech’s payload processing facility in Titusville, Florida, just a few miles from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center gate.
The test ended a two-month campaign at Astrotech since the Lucy spacecraft arrived from Lockheed Martin’s plant in Colorado. Technicians load propellant hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide into the probe to power the small maneuvering engine and main engine that helps Lucy navigate her asteroid target.
“Lucy is ready and we are ready to fly,” said Hal Levison, principal investigator for the mission at the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) in Boulder, Colorado.
The $981 million mission will be the first to explore a population of asteroids called Trojans that orbit the Sun in front of and behind Jupiter.
Scientists believe the Trojan asteroid is a diverse example of the kind of small planet building blocks that remained after the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Lucy will fly past eight different asteroids from 2025 to 2033, including seven in the Trojan Swarms.
The 1,500 kilogram Lucy spacecraft is scheduled to launch on October 16 during 75 minutes of window opening at 5:34 a.m. EDT (0834 GMT) aboard an Atlas-5 rocket. The mission has 23 days to take off and takes advantage of the unique alignment between Earth and asteroids in the outer solar system.
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If anything stands in the way of this year’s launch, NASA has the option to launch Lucy in October 2022 without affecting the mission’s scientific objectives.
But Florida’s induction campaign is in full swing, and officials have overcome hurdles associated with the COVID-19 pandemic to keep Lucy on schedule.
“The pandemic is hitting us at a very bad time,” said Arlin Bartels, deputy project manager for Lucy at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “It was just when the instrument team was just starting to produce and test.
“More than 400 components went into the spacecraft. At this point we are still in the supply chain phase. Planetary start times are very unforgiving at best because everything has to come and happen on schedule,” said Bartels. “Trying to do this during a pandemic like this is a very scary situation and I’m not sure when the pandemic hit, everyone thought we could do it in time.”
But the engineers finished assembling the spacecraft, installed its three scientific instruments, finished building the fan-shaped solar cell, and put Lucy through a series of tests to make sure it could withstand the harsh launch and space operations.
“We’re not currently working on any spacecraft or launchers that concern us,” said Omar Baez, NASA’s launch director for the Lucy mission.
Last Friday, the United Launch Alliance completed a countdown dress rehearsal at Cape Canaveral. The launch team loaded kerosene, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen fuel into Lucy’s mission Atlas 5 rocket and checked that the launcher and ground systems were ready for the actual countdown.
“We left this test on Friday night in good shape so the vehicle is ready to accommodate Lucy’s encapsulated spacecraft,” Baez said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. “So we’re ready to go.”
When ULA tested the Atlas 5 rocket last week, workers at Astrotech’s payload processing facility encapsulated the spacecraft Lucy in the Atlas 5 nose dome. The aerodynamic fairing protects the probe during final preparations before liftoff and protects the vehicle during the first few minutes of the ascent into space.
Manufactured by ULA in Harlingen, Texas, the 13.8-foot (4.2-meter) payload fairing is emblazoned with the Lucy Mission logo. The badge features a pictorial representation of the fossilized remains of a human ancestor named Lucy by the scientists who discovered her in Ethiopia in 1974.
Lucy’s skeleton is named after the asteroid mission Lucy.
As the fossil record informs scientists about human evolution, Trojan asteroids can provide clues about the ancient history of the solar system. After Jupiter formed and settled in its current orbit, the asteroids were trapped in swarms, each centered on a gravitationally stable libration point in front of and behind the largest planet in the solar system.
Lucy, the fossil, got its name after scientists heard the Beatles song “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” when they celebrated the discovery. The scientists who developed the Trojan asteroid rover looked at the connection.
“These asteroids really are like diamonds in the sky in terms of their scientific value in understanding how the giant planets formed and how the solar system evolved,” Levison said.
“This fossil has changed our understanding of hominid evolution, just as we hope the Lucy spacecraft will change our understanding of the solar system,” said Cathy Olkin, deputy director of mission research at SWRI.
NASA selected the Lucy mission, along with another asteroid researcher named Psyche, to develop in 2017. Psyche is scheduled to launch next year to orbit the metal-rich asteroid.
Researchers believe the Trojan asteroid is a relic from the earliest times in the history of the solar system when similar small bodies gathered to form gas and ice planets in the outer solar system.
“If all of these stories are true, and Lucy will test some of these hypotheses, these objects do represent objects that have formed throughout the outer solar system and are now in the Trojan Flock where missions like Lucy can go and study. “He is,” Levison said.
Scientists know very little about Trojan asteroids. Lucy will be the first spacecraft to ever fly through the Trojan Swarms, where researchers have found more than 7,000 tiny objects. There may be thousands more waiting to be discovered with large telescopes.
But even the Hubble Space Telescope cannot reveal any details about the composition and appearance of the Trojan asteroid. Scientists have a rough estimate of the size of any object Lucy will visit and know very little about its color. Some are gray, others are more reddish.
After launching from Cape Canaveral, the Lucy spacecraft will spend a year in an Earth-like orbit around the sun before returning to its home planet next October for a gravity-assisted loop maneuver into the solar system.
A second Earth flyby in December 2024 will send Lucy on her first asteroid encounter. The spacecraft will blast past the asteroid Donaldjohanson, named after the scientist who discovered the Lucy fossil, in April 2025.
Then Lucy will fly in the first Trojan swarm and in just the 15 months between August 2027 and November 2028 will visit five asteroids – including the tiny moon of one of its objects.
At its farthest arc, Lucy will be more than 500 million miles (800 million kilometers) from the sun. The spacecraft will be the furthest spacecraft from the sun to ever rely on solar energy.
One final sweep of Earth in 2030 will prepare Lucy for the final rendezvous of the 12-year mission, the flyby of a pair of binary asteroids named Patroclus and Menoetius in March 2033. Each of the two objects is roughly the same size, over 100 Kilometers in diameter. , which makes it Lucy’s solar system’s biggest target.
With any asteroid, Lucy only has a few hours to get the best images and gather the most useful data. The probe will pass through the asteroid at a relative speed of a few miles per second, using a gimbal instrument platform to aim its camera and scientific instruments.
“Lucy is on a flyby mission. So after years of traveling over a billion miles to reach our destination, we targeted them almost head-on and flew within 1,000 kilometers of their surface,” said Keith Noll, NASA project scientist for the Lucy mission. “And Lucy didn’t slow down on this shortcut.”
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