A persistent solar array on NASA’s Lucy mission could yield enough yield for the mission to continue its asteroid-hunting mandate with few problems, NASA reports.
The agency said it made “significant progress” in dealing with a solar array on the Lucy mission that failed to fully deploy after the spacecraft’s launch in October 2021. Engineers have been fixing the matter for months.
Lucy has two nearly circular solar arrays, each 7 meters wide, that can unfold like a fan. The arrays are critical to powering the mission, but one of the arrays experienced a deployment issue. An update in January indicated that the second array was deployed a little less than 350 degrees at the time due to a problem with a lanyard.
Related: Get to know the 8 asteroids that NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will visit
However, on Thursday (June 28), NASA officials said the Lucy team managed to open the array between 353 and 357 degrees. (Full success would be 360 degrees.)
“The array is under a lot more tension, making it a lot more stable,” agency officials added in a blog post (opens in new tab). “The mission team has growing confidence that the solar array will successfully meet the mission’s requirements in its current tensed and stabilized state.”
However, NASA must now pause its efforts to assist Lucy as the spacecraft moves to a place where it cannot easily receive orders from its people on Earth.
“Due to thermal limitations caused by the relative positions of Earth, spacecraft and the Sun, the spacecraft will not be able to communicate with Earth via its high-performance antenna for several months,” NASA officials wrote.
While engineers can keep in touch with Lucy via a low-gain antenna, this transmitter can handle less data. Full communications should resume in October, according to NASA. On October 16, Lucy will fly by Earth to pick up speed for her journey to nine Trojan asteroids orbiting the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter; The spacecraft will also come out of the partial power outage at this time.
NASA may attempt to continue using this tricky solar array while the spacecraft remains nearby “if deemed necessary,” officials wrote in the Post.
Lucy successfully completed a trajectory correction maneuver on Jun 21, NASA determined.
Although the spacecraft receives a lot of power near Earth, the arrays must be nearly fully deployed to generate enough power in orbit Jupiter, where the sunlight is much weaker. The giant gas giant has an average orbital distance of 484 million miles (778 million kilometers) from the Sun, about five times farther than Earth.
Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids orbiting the Sun in front of and behind the planet. These small worlds could contain remnants of the early solar system, and in turn provide information about how our neighborhood formed.
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