Latest news with #Donaldjohanson
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Psyche spacecraft's sci-fi thrusters suffer glitch on way to metal-rich asteroid
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. On Tuesday (April 29), NASA announced that its Psyche probe has suffered a setback concerning its propulsion system while nearly 150 million miles (238 million kilometers) from our planet. The boxy, solar-winged craft is headed to the peculiar object for which it is named: 16 Psyche, an asteroid that appears to have an unusually high metal content. The complication surrounds a "decrease in fuel pressure" within Psyche's solar electric propulsion setup, NASA says, which led the team to power off the thrusters until a solution arises. However, the agency also affirms that these thrusters can remain off until at least mid-June before worries arise about Psyche's trajectory toward its asteroid target. "The mission team has chosen to defer thrusting while engineers work to understand the pressure decrease," NASA said in a statement. "The electric propulsion system has two identical fuel lines, and the team may decide to switch to the backup fuel line to resume thrusting." Like the probe itself, Psyche's propulsion system is blazing new trails. This is the first time, the mission team says, that this specific mechanism of zipping through space has been used on a probe beyond lunar orbit. In essence, sunlight collected with Psyche's large solar arrays gets converted into electricity, which then powers up the spacecraft's four thrusters. Once powered up with enough sunlight-derived energy, the thrusters — called "Hall thrusters" — use electromagnetic fields to expel charged atoms of xenon gas that are stored in tanks aboard the spacecraft. In addition to giving Psyche's thrusters a pretty cool neon blue glow, this xenon expulsion creates a gentle thrust to move the spacecraft — gentle enough to exert "the same amount of pressure you'd feel holding three quarters in your hand," NASA has said. However, the point is for that subtle thrust to build up momentum over time, which is especially easy to do in the vacuum of space. All the while, barely any fuel will be used, meaning Psyche is highly efficient and light. "With no atmospheric drag to hold it back, the spacecraft eventually will accelerate to speeds of up to 124,000 miles per hour (200,000 kilometers per hour) relative to Earth," NASA explains. By contrast, NASA says traditional chemical propulsion would have required Psyche to be packed with 15 times more fuel before it was launched to space on Oct. 13, 2023. Related Stories: — Is asteroid Psyche actually a planetary core? James Webb Space Telescope results cast doubt — NASA's Lucy probe captures 1st close-up images of asteroid Donaldjohanson, revealing 'strikingly complicated geology' — Trump administration could slash NASA science budget by 50%, reports suggest In terms of the issue that Psyche is currently experiencing, it has to do with the way the xenon gas is being fed into the thrusters for expulsion. "On April 1, the spacecraft detected a pressure drop in the line that feeds the xenon gas to the thrusters, going from 36 pounds per square inch (psi) to about 26 psi," NASA said in the recent statement about the glitch. We'll likely know more about whether the backup line will be used, or if the original line improves its condition, in the coming weeks. Hopefully, Psyche bounces back to full health so it can investigate the many mysteries of 16 Psyche. One of the biggest is whether the asteroid truly is filled with extremely valuable metals (metals we can mine?), is a bare planetary core, or is just a sneaky pile of random rubble. The next major milestone for the mission's route falls in the spring of 2026, when Psyche will fly by Mars and use the Red Planet's gravitational tides to catapult itself toward the main asteroid belt. If all goes to plan, we'll get a peek at 16 Psyche in 2029.
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA spacecraft zooms by strange asteroid, beams back images
A NASA spacecraft is traveling to the most mysterious asteroids in the solar system. On the way there, it snapped images of the curious, elongated asteroid dubbed "Donaldjohanson." On April 20, the over 50-foot-wide Lucy spacecraft approached as close as some 600 miles from Donaldjohanson, which is aptly named for the discoverer of the famed Lucy hominid fossil, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson. The craft sped by at 30,000 mph, and used a specialized camera to capture a detailed view of the five-mile-wide asteroid. The images show a unique-looking asteroid, with a narrow neck connecting the object's two lobes. SEE ALSO: If a scary asteroid will actually strike Earth, here's how you'll know "These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery," Tom Statler, a NASA planetary scientist and program scientist of the mission, said in a statement. "The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense." New imagery of the asteroid Donaldjohanson captured by NASA's Lucy spacecraft. Credit: NASA / Goddard / SwRI / Johns Hopkins APL / NOIRLab (The asteroid seen in the animation above was observed at a distance of 1,000 to 660 miles away.) The Trojan asteroids — two swarms of diverse asteroids trapped around the gas giant Jupiter (one in front and one behind) — are of profound interest to planetary scientists. These asteroids can't leave Jupiter's potent gravitational influence, so Trojan meteorites likely don't land on Earth, depriving us of samples. Crucially, researchers suspect these icy rocks are captured relics of our solar system's formation some 4 billion years ago. If so, the Trojans are the smaller building blocks of planets. They can help tell us how Earth, and the other planets, came to be. "If we want to understand ourselves, we have to understand these small bodies," Hal Levison, a planetary scientist who leads the unprecedented mission to investigate the Trojans, previously told Mashable. "This is the first reconnaissance of the Trojan swarms," Levison added. This high-speed flyby of Donaldjohanson is the spacecraft's last "dress rehearsal" before it arrives at its first Trojan in August 2027, named Eurybates. To investigate the Trojans, Lucy is equipped with a suite of powerful cameras, including the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, or L'LORRI, which captured the images above. While it's not unusual for an object in space to be a "contact binary" — meaning two objects that orbited so closely they eventually merged — NASA noted that "the team was surprised by the odd shape of the narrow neck connecting the two lobes, which looks like two nested ice cream cones." Donaldjohanson isn't a primary target of Lucy's mission, but its unusual shape and structure will provide further insight into the origins of such primordial space objects, how they formed, and how our world formed.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA's Lucy probe captures 1st close-up images of asteroid Donaldjohanson, revealing 'strikingly complicated geology'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. NASA's Lucy spacecraft, currently headed toward Jupiter on an asteroid-hopping mission, has captured an impressive close-up of its second target: the space rock 52246 Donaldjohanson. Lucy launched in 2021, embarking on a 12-year journey toward Jupiter's orbit to study an unexplored swarm of asteroids called Jupiter's Trojans. These asteroids are remnants of our early solar system that share the giant planet's orbit around the sun. Along the way, the spacecraft is also squeezing in time for a few dress rehearsals for its Trojan targets down the road — and on Sunday (April 20), it swooped within 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) of the asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson who co-discovered the Lucy hominid fossil in northern Ethiopia in 1974. Images of the asteroid Lucy took as it approached the three-mile-wide (five-kilometer-wide) asteroid showed wide swings in brightness, suggesting it was either a slowly-rotating rock, appearing brighter when its longer sides faced the spacecraft, or an elongated object. Indeed, close-up images of the asteroid sent home by Lucy on Sunday confirmed both: The asteroid was once two smaller pieces that have conjoined into a larger whole, with a distinct narrow neck between the two lobes. "Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly complicated geology," Hal Levison, the principal investigator for Lucy at Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said in a statement. "As we study the complex structures in detail, they will reveal important information about the building blocks and collisional processes that formed the planets in our solar system." The new images show the asteroid appearing to rotate. However, this apparent motion isn't due to the asteroid itself spinning — which it does at a very slow rate of three years and eight months — but rather the result of the Lucy spacecraft whizzing by during its flyby at a relative velocity of 8.3 miles per second (13.4 kilometers per second), NASA said. Preliminary analyses of these images suggest the asteroid, which is likely a fragment of a collision about 150 million years ago, is larger than scientists initially estimated — measuring about 5 miles (8 km) long and 2 miles (3.5 km) wide at its widest point. Related Stories: — NASA's asteroid-hopping Lucy probe takes 1st images of its next target: Donaldjohanson — NASA asteroid surveyor snaps stunning views of Earth and moon on way to Jupiter's Trojans — Asteroid 'Dinky,' visited by NASA's Lucy spacecraft, birthed its own moon The images do not technically reveal the entire asteroid, to be clear, as it is larger than the Lucy imager's field of view. The mission team anticipates it will take up to a week to download the remaining encounter data from the spacecraft, which will provide a more complete picture of the asteroid's overall shape. "These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery," Tom Statler, the program scientist for the Lucy mission at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in the statement. "The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense." Following this encounter, Lucy will spend the rest of this year cruising through the asteroid belt toward the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. Its first Trojan flyby, of asteroid Eurybates and its satellite Queta, is scheduled for August 2027.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA's Lucy spacecraft gets up-close look of strange peanut-shaped asteroid: See images
A NASA spacecraft recently got an up-close look at a strange peanut-shaped space rock floating through the cosmos in the main asteroid belt. Not to worry: Astronomers aren't interested in the small asteroid named Donaldjohanson for any danger it poses to Earth, unlike an infamous "city-killer" asteroid that briefly attracted attention earlier this year before it, too, was dismissed as a threat. It's the shape and possible cosmic history of Donaldjohanson that instead intrigued NASA when the space agency's Lucy spacecraft recently passed the asteroid by during its own cosmic journey. The solar-powered probe conducted a flyby on April 20 of the asteroid and has begun transmitting images back to Earth, which NASA released Monday. Astronomers believe Donaldjohanson is a fragment from a collision 150 million years ago, making it one of the youngest in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter ever visited by a spacecraft. Search for extraterrestrials: Could alien life thrive on K2-18b? What to know about the distant exoplanet Discovered in 1981, Donaldjohanson is named after the American paleoanthropologist credited with the 1974 discovery of the "Lucy" pre-human ancestor fossil – the namesake of the overarching NASA mission. The Lucy spacecraft's observations revealed the asteroid to have an elongated shape and an odd narrow neck connecting two lobes, which NASA compared to "two nested ice cream cones." The space rock – about five miles long and two miles wide at its widest point – is believed to be a contact binary, meaning it's an object formed from two smaller cosmic bodies crashing into one another. While flying within about 600 miles of the asteroid on April 20, the Lucy spacecraft autonomously used all three of the science instruments it's equipped with to observe Donaldjohanson in both black-and-white and infrared light. The asteroid is not fully visible in the first set of high-resolution images NASA released Monday, as the space rock is larger than Lucy's field of view. But the space agency is in the process of downlinking the remainder of Lucy's data that will give the mission operators a better idea of the asteroid's shape and size. The Donaldjohanson asteroid is not a primary science target of the Lucy mission, which commenced on Oct. 16, 2021 with the launch of the solar-powered spacecraft from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft, which measures at nearly 52 feet wide with its solar arrays unfurled, is on a 12-year-mission to explore eight space rocks known as Trojan asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter as it goes around the sun. The Trojan asteroids are intriguing to astronomers because they are believed to be composed of raw materials left over from the formation some 4 billion years ago of our solar system's giant planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Primarily managed from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, the Lucy mission is named for a fossilized skeleton of a human ancestor, which in turn was named for the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Though the earlier discovery was terrestrial – not cosmic – in nature, NASA believes both share a similar DNA: Expanding humanity's understanding of our origins. Donaldjohanson is one of three asteroids in the solar system's main asteroid belt that Lucy plans to flyby in addition to the Trojan asteroids it has yet to observe. Lucy's first asteroid encounter came on Nov. 1, 2023 when it got an up close look of an asteroid named Dinkinesh, as well as its satellite, Selam. The asteroid shares its name with the name borrowed from an Ethiopian word for the Lucy fossil. NASA officials believe that studying such space rocks in the main asteroid belt will lend an understanding of how the planets of our solar system formed. It's also helpful to think of the flybys of Dinkinesh and Donaldjohanson as dress rehearsals, or tests, of what's yet to come: Lucy's first encounter with one of its main targets, the Jupiter Trojan asteroid named Eurybates in August 2027. 'These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,' Tom Statler, program scientist for the Lucy mission, said in a statement. 'The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense.' Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at elagatta@ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: NASA's Lucy spacecraft gets look at peanut-shaped asteroid: See images
USA Today
22-04-2025
- Science
- USA Today
NASA's Lucy spacecraft gets up-close look of strange peanut-shaped asteroid: See images
NASA's Lucy spacecraft gets up-close look of strange peanut-shaped asteroid: See images Donaldjohanson is likely a fragment from a collision 150 million years ago, making it one of the youngest in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter ever visited by a spacecraft. Show Caption Hide Caption Whew! Asteroid risk level shifts lower overnight for Earth impact. Asteroid 2024 YR4 had a 3.1% chance of hitting earth in 2032 according to experts, but the chances dropped to 1.5% overnight. Here's why. A NASA spacecraft recently got an up-close look at a strange peanut-shaped space rock floating through the cosmos in the main asteroid belt. Not to worry: Astronomers aren't interested in the small asteroid named Donaldjohanson for any danger it poses to Earth, unlike an infamous "city-killer" asteroid that briefly attracted attention earlier this year before it, too, was dismissed as a threat. It's the shape and possible cosmic history of Donaldjohanson that instead intrigued NASA when the space agency's Lucy spacecraft recently passed the asteroid by during its own cosmic journey. The solar-powered probe conducted a flyby on April 20 of the asteroid and has begun transmitting images back to Earth, which NASA released Monday. Astronomers believe Donaldjohanson is a fragment from a collision 150 million years ago, making it one of the youngest in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter ever visited by a spacecraft. Search for extraterrestrials: Could alien life thrive on K2-18b? What to know about the distant exoplanet NASA spacecraft gets look at strangely-shaped asteroid Discovered in 1981, Donaldjohanson is named after the American paleoanthropologist credited with the 1974 discovery of the "Lucy" pre-human ancestor fossil – the namesake of the overarching NASA mission. The Lucy spacecraft's observations revealed the asteroid to have an elongated shape and an odd narrow neck connecting two lobes, which NASA compared to "two nested ice cream cones." The space rock – about five miles long and two miles wide at its widest point – is believed to be a contact binary, meaning it's an object formed from two smaller cosmic bodies crashing into one another. While flying within about 600 miles of the asteroid on April 20, the Lucy spacecraft autonomously used all three of the science instruments it's equipped with to observe Donaldjohanson in both black-and-white and infrared light. The asteroid is not fully visible in the first set of high-resolution images NASA released Monday, as the space rock is larger than Lucy's field of view. But the space agency is in the process of downlinking the remainder of Lucy's data that will give the mission operators a better idea of the asteroid's shape and size. What is NASA's Lucy mission? The Donaldjohanson asteroid is not a primary science target of the Lucy mission, which commenced on Oct. 16, 2021 with the launch of the solar-powered spacecraft from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The spacecraft, which measures at nearly 52 feet wide with its solar arrays unfurled, is on a 12-year-mission to explore eight space rocks known as Trojan asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter as it goes around the sun. The Trojan asteroids are intriguing to astronomers because they are believed to be composed of raw materials left over from the formation some 4 billion years ago of our solar system's giant planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Primarily managed from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, the Lucy mission is named for a fossilized skeleton of a human ancestor, which in turn was named for the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Though the earlier discovery was terrestrial – not cosmic – in nature, NASA believes both share a similar DNA: Expanding humanity's understanding of our origins. Flyby was Lucy's second asteroid encounter Donaldjohanson is one of three asteroids in the solar system's main asteroid belt that Lucy plans to flyby in addition to the Trojan asteroids it has yet to observe. Lucy's first asteroid encounter came on Nov. 1, 2023 when it got an up close look of an asteroid named Dinkinesh, as well as its satellite, Selam. The asteroid shares its name with the name borrowed from an Ethiopian word for the Lucy fossil. NASA officials believe that studying such space rocks in the main asteroid belt will lend an understanding of how the planets of our solar system formed. It's also helpful to think of the flybys of Dinkinesh and Donaldjohanson as dress rehearsals, or tests, of what's yet to come: Lucy's first encounter with one of its main targets, the Jupiter Trojan asteroid named Eurybates in August 2027. 'These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,' Tom Statler, program scientist for the Lucy mission, said in a statement. 'The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense.' Eric Lagatta covers breaking and trending news for USA TODAY. Reach him at elagatta@
