Nasas Space Experience Sidea Lucy A close meeting is established with an asteroid strangely to more than 100 million miles from the earth, and scientists are not sure what they will find.
The spacecraft will vuele through the asteroid DonaldjoHanson on Sunday afternoon and will begin to send the first clear images of the space rock described alternately as a “snowman” and a “bowling alfiler”.
The rock outside this world is a fragment of an old collision, it is approximately 2.5 miles in length and much narrower.
“We don’t know what to expect. That is what makes this so great,” said the main scientist of the project, Hall Levison of the Southwest Research Institute.
“It will not be a basic potato. We already know it,” he said, explaining that Donaldjohnson can even be two asteroids in a binary orbit.
With the overflow that occurs to about 139 million miles from the earth, the images and data collected by Lucy will probably not be completely recorded until Monday, since each information takes 12 minutes to transmit home.
Lucy will pass to about 596 miles from the surface of DonaldjoHanson, which is drifting in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The encounter with DonaldjoHanson is just a dress essay for Lucy’s main performance: visit Trojan asteroids, a massive rock field that follow Jupiter while surrounding the sun.
Lucy is expected to find 11 asteroids on your total trip, then pass the rest of your days to drift on the solar system equipped with a golden plaque with information about modern society for any future civilization that you can find.
Before DonaldjoHanson, Lucy I had an encounter with the small Dinkonsh asteroid In 2023, it was discovered that he had a small moon that orbit him.
The asteroid in Sunday’s visit is named after the paleontologist Donald Johanson, who discovered the bones of a distant human ancestor, an Australopithecus Afarensis of about 3 million years ago, in Ethiopia 50 years ago. Those remains were called Lucy.
Johanson will join the teams in Mission Control for the overflow of Sunday.
With Mail cables
