All Is Not Well With NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft

Telemetry via NASA’s Deep Space Network shows that Lucy as a whole is still safe, and its mission is not in jeopardy. All other systems are normal. Nevertheless, NASA’s mission engineers are already on the problem. In a brief blog post, NASA announced the issue, and said, “In the current spacecraft attitude, Lucy can continue to operate with no threat to its health and safety. The team is analyzing spacecraft data to understand the situation and determine next steps to achieve full deployment of the solar array.”

While the spacecraft itself is not in danger, getting its panels back into mission spec is obviously preferred. Earth orbits at 1 AU, and the asteroids Lucy is destined to visit orbit at twice that distance or more. At 2 AU+, the spacecraft will receive perhaps three percent of the power it would receive if it were in Earth’s orbit around the sun.

Lucy’s mission is to visit a main-belt asteroid named 52246 Donaldjohnson, named after the discoverer of the Lucy fossil. The spacecraft will also visit several asteroids that orbit within the gravitational eddies at the Jupiter-Sun L4 and L5 points: the “Greek camp” and “Trojan camp” respectively. These eddies exist because they sit at points equidistant from the sun and Jupiter. While the Lagrange points don’t themselves have any gravitational pull, they are relatively stable with respect to the two-body system. Inertia lets orbiting bodies cluster there, rather than being drawn off into another path.

NASA has had to deal with this type of repair before; they repaired a damaged and power-starved Skylab space station while it was in orbit, by freeing a frozen hinge on its damaged solar array. The agency also successfully contended with a stuck solar panel on the ISS back in 2006. So, the fix for Lucy may be as simple as folding the panels and unfolding them. But Skylab was in low-earth orbit, so we sent humans to fix it. We won’t have that option with Lucy, so hopefully the legendary ingenuity of NASA’s earthbound engineers will come through, as they have so many times before.

Lucy’s science payload is powered by the solar panels, so its mission could be hampered if those instruments can’t find the power to run. But the spacecraft’s transit to the asteroid belt is controlled by other means. Fourteen hydrazine thrusters, made by Aerojet Rocketdyne, are responsible for propulsion and course corrections.

The probe’s mission is to visit the “fossils” of planet formation, and it was named for the fossilized skeleton of a hominin who changed our understanding of human evolution. That hominin was in turn named after the iconic Beatles song, which they were blasting on repeat in base camp that night, because reasons. Scientific instruments aboard the spacecraft include a thermal emission spectrometer titled L’TES, and a tool called L’Ralph that includes a color camera and an IR spectrometer. And in company with the black-and-white L’LORRI camera (wow, does this roster sound vaguely Vulcan), Lucy carries for one of its instruments a disc of pure, flawless lab-grown diamond. While multiple sources refer to this information, we weren’t able to find an explanation of which piece of equipment will use the diamond disc or how it contributes to the mission.

Assuming all goes well, Lucy will reach Donaldjohnson in April 2025.

Continue reading

Protect Your Online Privacy With the 5 Best VPNs

Investing in a VPN is a smart choice right now, but the options are vast. To help narrow things down a bit, we've rounded up five of our very favorite consumer services.

RISC-V Tiptoes Towards Mainstream With SiFive Dev Board, High-Performance CPU

RISC V continues to make inroads across the market, this time with a cheaper and more fully-featured test motherboard.

The PlayStation 5 Will Only Be Available Online for Launch Day

The PlayStation 5 isn't going to be available in stores on launch day, and if you want to pick up an M.2 SSD to expand its storage, you'll have some time to figure out that purchase.

ARMing for War: New Cortex-A78C Will Challenge x86 in the Laptop Market

ARM took another step towards challenging x86 in its own right with the debut of the Cortex-A78C this week. The new chip packs up to eight "big" CPU cores and up to an 8MB L3 cache.