Lucy, a NASA spacecraft, is now moving through the solar system on its route to examine the Trojan asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit. The mission was supposed to make its first close encounter with an asteroid in 2025, but a new plan calls for the spacecraft to fly by a bonus asteroid later this year.
Lucy will travel by an asteroid that is only 0.4 miles across and is currently unidentified; it is known only by its technical name, 1999 VD57. But it happens to be near the road Lucy is on, and by making minor changes to its path, Lucy will be able to get even closer.
“There are millions of asteroids in the main asteroid belt,” said a member of the Lucy team, Raphael Marschall of the Nice Observatory in France, who picked out the asteroid to be visited. “I selected 500,000 asteroids with well-defined orbits to see if Lucy might be traveling close enough to get a good look at any of them, even from a distance. This asteroid really stood out. Lucy’s trajectory as originally designed will take it within 40,000 miles of the asteroid, at least three times closer than the next closest asteroid.”
