- NASA is currently preparing for its next distance-visiting mission ready for launch this year.
- The mission, which sees a spacecraft named Lucy making a flyby of asteroids believed to have originated with the birth of our solar system, is expected to launch in October.
- The pandemic made coronavirus preparation for the mission more difficult than it otherwise would have been, but NASA managed to stay on track with the expected start date.
You may have noticed that there has been a lot of talk about asteroids in the scientific community recently. With missions like Hayabusa2 from Japan’s JAXA space agency and NASA’s own OSIRIS-REx visiting the Bennu space rock, researchers are excited to learn as much as they can about the rocks that move through our system.
Never sit idly by and wait for one mission to finish before preparing for the next, NASA is fast sending a spaceship called Lucy on a mission to explore make some asteroids that are really ancient. The mission aims to send Lucy to fly past a collection of space rocks called Trojan asteroids. These are rocks that are believed to have been “remnants” of the solar system in its youth, and could teach us a great deal about the history of our system and how planets came to be. like the Earth to existence.
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In a new blog post, NASA reveals that Lucy has acquired her second scientific instrument, called L’TES. The device – the Lucy Thermal Emission Spectrometer – will be crucial for what the spacecraft sees of the Trojan asteroids. The spacecraft will be equipped with three main scientific instruments, so the installation of this second device is very much for mission planners and NASA as a whole.
When Lucy leaves Earth and heads for the Trojan asteroids, the goal will be a distant flyby and a few pictures. The plan for Lucy to focus on seven specific objects located in this collection of space rocks, examines them in detail. That’s where the L’TES come in.
The spectrometer applied to Lucy will give scientists a much better idea of the state of the substance that makes up the asteroids. As we’ve already seen with Ryugu and Bennu asteroids, the shape and surface of space rocks can change wildly, and the spectrometer allows Lucy to determine how hard the material is, or if it is more dusty and diffuse. Lucy never touches any of these rocks, so it is essential for the mission to explore the surface in such a way.
“The L’TES team has applied our expertise in designing, manufacturing, and working on similar thermal dissipation spectra on other missions such as OSIRIS-REx and Mars Global Meter as we built the this instrument, ”Phil Christensen, Chief Instrumental Inspector for Lucy’s mission, said in a statement. “Each instrument has its own challenges, but based on our experience we expect L’TES to provide us with excellent data, as well as some curious, about these enigmatic objects.”
Mike Wehner has been reporting on technology and video games for the past decade, covering breaking news and trends in VR, wearables, smartphones, and the future of tech. Mike was most recently a Tech Editor at The Daily Dot, and has appeared in USA Today, Time.com, and in countless web and print outlets. His love of narrating only second place on his game thesis.