On October 16, 2021, our Lucy spacecraft will begin its journey to visit a record-breaking number of asteroids. The 12-year mission starts from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center where it’ll launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket. From there, Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit a record number of destinations in independent orbits around the sun – one main belt asteroid and seven of Jupiter’s Trojan Asteroids.
Like the mission’s namesake – the fossilized human ancestor, “Lucy,” whose skeleton provided unique insight into humanity’s evolution – Lucy will revolutionize our knowledge of planetary origins and the formation of the solar system. Lucy’s first launch attempt in its 21-day launch window is scheduled for 5:34 a.m. EDT on October 16.
Lucy is a planned NASA space probe that will complete a 12-year journey to eight different asteroids, visiting a main belt asteroid as well as seven Jupiter trojans, asteroids which share Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun, orbiting either ahead of or behind the planet. All target encounters will be fly-by encounters. The Lucy spacecraft is the centerpiece of a US$981 million mission.
On 4 January 2017, Lucy was chosen, along with the Psyche mission, as NASA’s Discovery Program missions 13 and 14 respectively. The mission is named after the Lucy hominid skeleton, because the study of Trojans could reveal the “fossils of planet formation”: materials that clumped together in the early history of the Solar System to form planets and other bodies. The Australopithecus itself was named after the 1967 Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.
Lucy is planned to launch in October 2021 on the 401 variant of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V launch vehicle, after which it will gain two gravity assists from Earth; one in 2022, and one in 2024. In 2025, it will fly by the inner main-belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, which was named after the discoverer of the Lucy hominid fossil. In 2027, it will arrive at the L4 Trojan cloud (the Greek camp of asteroids that orbits about 60° ahead of Jupiter), where it will fly by four Trojans, 3548 Eurybates (with its satellite), 15094 Polymele, 11351 Leucus, and 21900 Orus. After these flybys, Lucy will return to Earth in 2031 whereupon it will receive another slight gravity assist to take it to the L5 Trojan cloud (the Trojan camp which trails about 60° behind Jupiter), where it will visit the binary Trojan 617 Patroclus with its satellite Menoetius in 2033. The mission may end with the Patroclus–Menoetius flyby, but at that point Lucy will be in a stable, 6-year orbit between the L4 and L5 clouds, and a mission extension will be possible.
Three instruments comprise the payload: a high-resolution visible imager, an optical and near-infrared imaging spectrometer and a thermal infrared spectrometer.
Exploration of Jupiter Trojans is one of the high priority goals outlined in the Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Jupiter Trojans have been observed by ground-based telescopes and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to be “dark with… surfaces that reflect little sunlight”. Jupiter is 5.2 AU (780Ă—106 km; 480Ă—106 mi) from the Sun, or about five times the Earth-Sun distance. The Jupiter Trojans are at a similar distance but can be somewhat farther or closer to the Sun depending on where they are in their orbits. There may be as many Trojans as there are asteroids in the asteroid belt.
NASA’s Curiosity rover explores Mount Sharp, a 5-mile-tall (8-kilometer-tall) mountain within the basin of Gale Crater on Mars.
Curiosity landed nine years ago on August 5, 2012, with a mission to study whether different Martian environments could have supported microbial life in the ancient past, when long-lived lakes and groundwater existed within Gale Crater.
SpaceX CRS-23, also known as SpX-23, is a Commercial Resupply Service mission to the International Space Station. The mission was contracted by NASA and was flown by SpaceX using the Cargo Dragon C208. This was the third flight for SpaceX under NASA’s CRS Phase 2 contract awarded in January 2016. A NASA Flight Planning Integration Panel (FPIP) from 2019 indicates that SpaceX cargo missions will begin to extend their duration to 60 days and beyond starting with CRS-23.
SpaceX plans to reuse the Cargo Dragons up to five times. The Cargo Dragon launches without SuperDraco abort engines, without seats, cockpit controls and the life support system required to sustain astronauts in space. This newer design provides several benefits, including a faster process to recover, refurbish and re-fly versus the earlier Dragon CRS design used for ISS cargo missions.
The GITAI S1 Robotic Arm Tech Demo will test GITAI Japan Inc.’s microgravity robot by placing the arm inside the newly added Nanoracks Bishop Airlock, which was carried to the station by Dragon C208.2 during the SpaceX CRS-21 mission last year. Once inside the airlock, the arm will perform numerous tests to demonstrate its versatility and dexterity.
Designed by GITAI Japan Inc., the robot will work as a general-purpose helper under the pressurized environment inside the Bishop Airlock. It will operate tools and switches and run scientific experiments. The next step will be to test it outside the ISS in the harsh space environment. The robot will be able to perform tasks both autonomously and via teleoperations. Its arm has eight degrees of freedom and a 1-meter reach. GITAI S1 is a semi-autonomous/semi-teleoperated robotic arm designed to conduct specified tasks internally and externally on space stations, on-orbit servicing, and lunar base development. By combining autonomous control via AI and teleoperations via the specially designed GITAI manipulation system H1, GITAI S1 on its own, possesses the capability to conduct generous-purpose tasks (manipulation of switches, tools, soft objects; conducting science experiments and assembly; high-load operations; etc.) that were extremely difficult for industrial robots such as task specific robotic arms to do.
Hurricanes are some of the most powerful and destructive weather events on Earth. To help study these powerful storms, NASA is launching TROPICS (Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats), a collection of six small satellites designed to measure storm strength by detecting the thermal radiation naturally emitted by the oxygen and water vapor in the air.
In June 2021, NASA launched a test version of the satellite, called a pathfinder, ahead of the constellation of six weather satellites planned for launch in 2022. When launched, the TROPICS satellites will work together to provide near-hourly microwave observations of a storm’s precipitation, temperature, and humidity. The mission is expected to help scientists understand the factors driving tropical cyclone intensification and to improve forecasting models.
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio/Katie Jepson (KBRwyle): Producer/Ellen T. Gray (ADNET): Writer/William Blackwell (MIT): Scientist/Jonathan North (KBRwyle): Animator/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez (USRA): Animator/Katie Jepson (KBRwyle): Animator/Taylor Johnson: Narration
Hundreds of meltwater lakes hide deep beneath the expanse of Antarctica’s ice sheet. With a powerful laser altimeter system in space, NASA’s Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) is helping scientists “see” under the ice.
Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scientific Visualization Studio/Jefferson Beck (KBRwyle): Lead Producer/Roberto Molar Candanosa (KBR): Lead Writer/Helen-Nicole Kostis (USRA): Lead Visualizer/Helen Amanda Fricker (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego): Lead Scientist/Matthew R. Siegfried (Colorado School of Mines): Lead Scientist
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