Skip to main content

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft swings by Earth on its way to Trojan asteroids

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is on its way to the Trojan asteroids to learn about the formation of the solar system, but it isn’t traveling in a straight line from Earth to the orbit of Jupiter. Instead, it is performing a series of slingshot maneuvers to help it on its journey, including a recent maneuver around Earth. This weekend, a few lucky observers were able to see Lucy as it performed an Earth flyby before heading back out into space.

Here's @LucyMission during today's Earth gravity assist. Screengrab from observations made by @plutoflag.
Tracking continues on https://t.co/u9JmKlOCQ3 pic.twitter.com/ZNBWjcYPhB

— Raphael Marschall (@SpaceMarschall) October 16, 2022

The spacecraft came closest to Earth at 7:04 a.m. ET on Sunday, October 16, when it passed within 220 miles of the Earth’s surface. Originally, it had been set to come event closer, but the Lucy team chose to keep a little more distance due to problems that Lucy has had with one of its solar arrays. Lucy has two round arrays, which deployed following launch, but one of them failed to deploy fully and did not latch into place. After months of careful tweaking, the second array is almost fully deployed, but still isn’t latched, so it was best to be cautious with the gravitational forces of a flyby.

Recommended Videos

“In the original plan, Lucy was actually going to pass about 30 miles closer to the Earth,” says Rich Burns, Lucy project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement. “However, when it became clear that we might have to execute this flyby with one of the solar arrays unlatched, we chose to use a bit of our fuel reserves so that the spacecraft passes the Earth at a slightly higher altitude, reducing the disturbance from the atmospheric drag on the spacecraft’s solar arrays.”

Illustration of NASA’s Lucy spacecraft performing a flyby of Earth. NASA

As Lucy moveda way from Earth, it also passed by the moon. This gave the spacecraft the opportunity to take some images that will be used for calibration, as the moon is a helpful stand-in for the asteroids that Lucy will eventually investigate.

“I’m especially excited by the final few images that Lucy will take of the moon,” said John Spencer, acting deputy project scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, which leads the Lucy mission. “Counting craters to understand the collisional history of the Trojan asteroids is key to the science that Lucy will carry out, and this will be the first opportunity to calibrate Lucy’s ability to detect craters by comparing it to previous observations of the moon by other space missions.”
Georgina Torbet
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
Asteroid with a 1% chance of hitting Earth in 2032 spotted by astronomers
Artist's impression of an asteroid. This image is not intended to reflect the characteristics of any specific known asteroid.

Astronomers have made a startling discovery: a medium-sized asteroid that could potentially impact the Earth within the next 10 years. However, experts agree that the public does not have to be concerned about this just yet, as space agencies are still in the process of collecting more data to determine the exact path of the object.

Named 2024 YR4, the asteroid was discovered on December 27, 2024 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Río Hurtado, Chile, and is projected to come close to Earth in December 2032.

Read more
Watch SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft crash to Earth
Starship stage separation.

SpaceX nailed the landing of its first-stage Super Heavy booster during the seventh test of its mighty Starship rocket on Thursday, but the upper-stage Starship spacecraft suffered what SpaceX likes to call a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” (in regular-speak, it blew up) soon after stage-separation.

A short while later, clips started appearing on social media apparently showing bits of the uncrewed Starship falling back to Earth near the Turks and Caicos Islands about 1,600 miles (2,600 km) east of the rocket’s launch site near Boca Chica, Texas. SpaceX chief Elon Musk reposted one of them, saying: "Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!" However, it was later reported that the FAA had to divert a number of flights in the area to ensure aircraft were kept away from the descending debris. It's also currently unknown if any of the debris reached land or if all of it landed in the sea.

Read more
NASA pushes back its Artemis moon missions due to heat shield issues
The Orion crew module for NASA’s Artemis II mission.

NASA has announced that it is delaying its ambitious Artemis II and Artemis III missions, which will see astronauts travel around and then land on the moon for the first time in over 50 years. The missions will be pushed to April 2026 and mid-2027 respectively, which is around six months later than previously planned.

The delay is due to problems with the Orion spacecraft's heat shield. Orion is the capsule in which crew members for each mission will travel, and it must withstand temperatures of nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit during re-entry through the Earth's atmosphere. On the previous Artemis I mission in 2022, the Orion capsule was used in an uncrewed test and fared generally well, completing the mission as planned.

Read more