Lucy, a space mission, was launched last October. It is headed out to Jupiter's orbit, but it will pass by a few asteroids. It will take close-up images of at least seven asteroids, making it the most ambitious asteroid mission ever created.
The Sun and Jupiter may have been together since the dawn of the solar system. It's much easier to get close to and study many of them in a single mission if you have so many of them together.
I wrote an overview of the mission before it was launched. Normally you don't hear much from missions like this until they get close to their goal, but images obtained on Feb. 14, 2022, were just released. They were taken to test Lucy's cameras, and they are pretty cool.
The picture was taken in New Mexico and shows the sight of the two mythical beasts. The stars are streaked a bit due to Earth's rotation, but it's enough for the purpose of showing where Lucy's cameras were pointed when they took their engineering test observations.
The field of view of Lucy's Terminal Tracking Cameras is shown in the red rectangle. One of the cameras is used for main operations and the other is used in case something goes wrong with the first camera. The stars in the field will be analyzed to aid in tracking the asteroids. It takes at least half an hour for light to reach Earth from Jupiter because it is too long to control the images from the ground.
The wide field of view of the T2C makes it possible for them to get the whole asteroid at the same time, and as the spacecraft moves these images can be used to make 3D stereo pairs to determine some surface topography on the asteroids.
The engineering test image is a little ratty, but it can be processed and you can still see a lot of stars. The fuzzy patch at the bottom right is the Rosette Nebula, a star-forming gas cloud about 5,000 light years away with thousands of newborn stars. The camera's sensitivity is demonstrated by the fact that it can be seen at all in this 10-second exposure.
The blue strip in the first image shows the field of view of the MVIC, one of the detectors on the camera. The first camera to fly on the New Horizon Pluto mission was called Alice because it was named after the husband and wife characters in the old sitcom The Honeymooners. The camera on Lucy is the same setup as the one onRalph.
MVIC has filters that pick out colors associated with different minerals on the asteroids. This is the result of its test, and it can take a panchromatic image.
Although the exposure time was short, many stars can be seen. This field overlaps T2C so that they can see the same thing at the same time, which will help in scientific analysis.
The Lucy LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager has the highest-resolution camera on Lucy, and the yellow square in the center of the first image shows it.
In the 10-second test image, stars 1/25,000th as faint as the human eye can see are visible. They are slightly smaller due to the long exposure, but can be made usable during science exposures. One of the workhorse cameras on Lucy will provide a vast amount of scientific data, and it will be able to see faint details on the asteroids.
Although none of these images will win a prize for their beauty, they are all beautiful: They show us a working spacecraft that will last for many, many years. Donaldjohanson, a main-belt rock about 4 kilometers wide, will be the first asteroid. What will we see?
We wouldn't have to send missions there if we knew. It is never a surprise that we will be surprised when a new object is investigated up close.
I can wait.
There is a glitch in the mission at the moment, Lucy has two circular solar panel array that unfolded like a fan, but one didn't fully deploy and is out of its full expanded state. If it is not locked in position, a main engine burn could damage it. Engineers are going to try to use a backup motor to finish the job, and should be done by May 9.
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