NASA’s Lucy mission began last year on its journey to Trojan asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit. Despite a problem with one of its solar arrays, the spacecraft was traveling on its way to study ancient asteroids in order to learn more about how the solar system formed. NASA has shared some of the first images taken by Lucy’s instruments as part of the calibration process.
Lucy has a total of four cameras, including the Twin Terminal Tracking Cameras (T2CAM), which have a wide field of view and are used to lock onto asteroids and point other instruments in the right direction while Lucy performs close flights. The other cameras are the Multicolor Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC), which will take panorama-like images, and the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI), which will take high-resolution close-up images of asteroids. In addition to its cameras, Lucy also has a spectrometer and a temperature mapping tool. Digitartlends.
These calibration images were taken in February of this year, as part of a procedure that included aiming the spacecraft’s instruments at 11 different targets to verify that the spacecraft could point correctly and that the instruments were sensitive and accurate enough. This was the second set of calibration images taken, after an initial but less detailed set taken shortly after its November 2021 launch.
The images show that the instruments are working fine and ready for an encounter with the Trojan asteroids, with Lucy due to arrive in 2027.
“We started work on the Lucy mission concept as early as 2014, so this launch has been in the pipeline for a long time,” Lucy principal investigator Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute said in the institute’s 2021 annual report. Before we reach the first asteroid, but these things are worth the wait and all the effort because of their enormous scientific value.”