NASA's Lucy spacecraft swings by Earth on its way to Trojans

Lucy isn't traveling in a straight line from Earth to Jupiter to learn about the formation of the solar system. A recent slingshot maneuver around Earth is one of the ways it is helping it on its journey. Lucy performed an Earth flyby over the weekend and a few people were able to see it.

Here's @LucyMission during today's Earth gravity assist. Screengrab from observations made by @plutoflag.

Tracking continues on https://t.co/u9JmKlOCQ3 pic.twitter.com/ZNBWjcYPhB

— Raphael Marschall (@SpaceMarschall) October 16, 2022

At 7 a.m., the spaceship came very close to Earth. It passed within 220 miles of the Earth's surface. Due to problems that Lucy has had with one of its solar panels, the Lucy team decided to keep a bit more distance. Lucy has two round array, which were deployed after launch, but one of them did not deploy fully. The second array is almost fully deployed, but still isn't latched, so it was best to be cautious.

The original plan was for Lucy to pass about 30 miles closer to the Earth. When it became clear that we might have to execute this flyby with one of the solar array unlatched, we chose to use a bit of our fuel reserves.

Lucy moved from Earth to the moon. The moon is a good stand-in for the asteroids that Lucy will eventually investigate.

John Spencer is an acting deputy project scientist at the Southwest Research Institute which leads the Lucy mission. This will be the first chance to calibrate Lucy's ability to detect craters by comparing it to previous observations of the moon.

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