Lucy made a flyby of Earth recently, capturing some stunning images of our planet on its way to investigate the Trojan asteroids. Lucy has had trouble with a solar array that hasn't been fully deployed. The team had hoped to fix the issue with the array, but it wasn't possible. They have had to stop trying to put the array in place.
Lucy's solar array collects energy from the sun to power her craft. After the vehicle was in space, the array was folded up and deployed. One of the two arrays was locked into place, but the other didn't deploy as expected. The power needed for the mission was collected by the fold out array. It wasn't as rigid as it could be because it wasn't fully deployed
Engineers have been working to deploy and latched the array since the problem was discovered. The team was concerned that the forces could shake the loose array and cause damage.
The team tried to deploy the array once more after the recent flyby of the spaceship. The array didn't fit into place after deployment. There was a small vibrating between the array and the attitude controller shown in the data. Further array deployment attempts have been paused while the attitude controller is updated to resolve this issue.
Since the array is warmed by the heat of the sun, it should be able to expand and provide more rigidity. The team hopes to try more deployment attempts once they have a better idea of the problem.
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