NASA spacecraft "Lucy" completes first gravity assist maneuver

Image courtesy of NASA

 NASA's "Lucy" spacecraft completed the first of its three gravity assist maneuvers today at 5:41 AM as it swung around Earth en route to study the Trojan asteroids surrounding Jupiter. The next gravity assist maneuver is scheduled to occur in December 2024.

Launched on October 16, 2021 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, Lucy is an unmanned spacecraft created with the purpose of studying the surface composition of five asteroids orbiting Jupiter and one within the Main Belt. Scientists believe these Trojan asteroids hold clues to the formation of the universe due to their individually wildly different surface compositions.

Lucy carries four instruments to achieve this task, the Lucy LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI), the Lucy Thermal Emission Spectrometer (L’TES) and L'Ralph, a combination of a Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) and a Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array spectrometer (LEISA).

Lucy hopes to have its first asteroid encounter in 2025 with the Main Belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, named for the anthropologist whose renowned work on human origins is also where the spacecraft takes its name.