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The image of an artist of the Lucy spacecraft that flies along a few Trojan asteroids. | Credit: Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center
The next stop for NASA’s asteroid-hoping spacecraft Lucy is a space stone called Donaldjohanson, a recently learned object researchers is around 150 million years old.
Lucy will fly past the three-mile wide (five kilometers) asteroid on April 20, but the journey usually serves as a rehearsal for other asteroid encounters on the road-rather Lucy’s final destination: Jupiter Trojan Asteroids. Lucy is planned for a 12-year mission to visit a total of 11 asteroids about two swarms that lead and chase Jupiter.
Yet every asteroid counts for this mission, and one new paper From researchers from the Southwest Research Institute Branch in Boulder, Colorado suggests that Donaldjohanson can have a few welcome surprises. It is especially likely to see how the last asteroid Lucy flew by, Dinkonsh, had a few its own treats.
“Based on ground -based observations, Donaldjohanson seems to be a special object”, Simone Marchi, deputy lead researcher of Lucy at Southwest Research Institute and main author of the new paper, said in a statement.
Marchi and his fellow researchers used computer modeling to find out that the asteroid was formed about 150 million years ago as a result of another, larger asteroid that broke apart. In the time since then, the team also learned that Donaldjohanson’s job and spider has evolved considerably.
“Details to indicate that it can be free and a slow rotator, possibly due to thermal brandes who have delayed his spider over time,” said David Vokrouhlický, a professor at Charles University, Prague, and co-author of the research, in the same explanation.
During next month’s flyby, Lucy will collect data about the form of asteroid, surface gegrology and cratering history. The data that Lucy will collect from Donaldjohanson is especially important because that information is only accessible from a proximity.
Credit: SWRI/ESA/OSIRIS/NASA/Goddard/Johns Hopkins APL/Noirlab/University of Arizona/Jaxa/University of Tokyo & Employees
Bennu and Ryugu are two asteroids who have sampled spacecraft in earlier missions. NASAs Osiris-Rex Mission Collected samples from Bennu and the Hayabusa2 Asteroid sampling spacecraft from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) Samples recorded from Ryugu.
“We can hardly wait for the flyby because from now on the characteristics of Donaldjohanson seem very different from Bennu and Ryugu. Yet we can discover unexpected connections,” Marchi added.
The Trojan asteroids interesting researchers because they contain old information about how our solar system originated. “These remains are effective fossils of the planet formation process and have essential indications to decipher the history of our solar system,” said Hal Levison, the most important researcher of the Mission of the Southwest Research Institute, in the same statement.
The Lucy Spacecraft was launched on October 16, 2021 from the Kennedy Space Center of NASA in Florida on top of a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V Rocket.
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“On earth-based observation and theoretical models can only take us to validate these models and reach the next level of detail, we need close-up data,” said Keith Noll, Lucy Project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in the same explanation.
“Lucy’s upcoming flyby will give us that.”
A study on these results was published On March 17 in the Planetary Science Journal.
