INSIDE THE SKY AT NIGHT

Back in September 2021, The Sky at Night show spoke to Carly Howett about NASA's then upcoming Lucy mission. As the spacecraft now approaches its main targets - the Trojan asteroids - we check in with her to see how the mission is going

- Carly Howett

When I last wrote about NASA's Lucy mission, we were waiting for it to launch, beginning its journey to three main-belt asteroids (the ones between Mars and Jupiter) before reaching its eight primary targets, the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. The Trojans are previously unexplored asteroids which lead and trail Jupiter in its orbit. They are remnants of planet formation and likely hold clues to how our Solar System evolved.

Lucy lifted off on a beautiful clear morning on 16 October 2021. Since then, it's been on quite an adventure. While the launch was perfect, it quickly became apparent that the deployment of Lucy's 7-metre-diameter (23ft) solar panels was not. While Lucy had one fully opened solar panel that was latched and rigid, the other didn't open all the way.

'Floppy' is not a word you want to associate with a spacecraft. It means that when you fire your engines, it's hard to understand how your craft will move. However, the solar panels were creating enough power to operate Lucy and the perfect launch put us on a trajectory that required very little change, giving the engineers time to work on techniques to mitigate the problem.