After traveling millions of miles over the past two years, the Lucy spacecraft has almost reached its first destination. NASA’s asteroid probe will briefly rendezvous with Dinkinesh in the main asteroid belt on Wednesday to prepare for its future visits of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. “Dinkinesh is about to be revealed to humanity for the first time.”Lucy has been visually tracking Dinkinesh since September 3. “Instead, we pre-program all the science observations.”After Wednesday’s flyby, Lucy will continue to image and track Dinkinesh for about another hour. The Lucy mission launched in October 2021 with the aim of studying the Trojan asteroids, a group of rocky bodies that lead and follow Jupiter as it orbits the Sun.

Source: The Nation October 31, 2023 09:03 UTC