NASA probe “Lucy” has “visited” its first asteroid Men can tolerate more than women, two beers a day is okay? Wrong, completely wrong!

NASA’s “Lucy” probe has visited its first asteroid. The probe flew past the asteroid ‘Dinkinesh’ on Wednesday at a distance of about 400 kilometers and successfully completed the maneuver, the US space agency NASA said. It now takes about a week to send all the collected data to Earth. The “Dinkinesh”, with a diameter of less than a kilometer, is the first of a dozen asteroids that the probe is intended to investigate – and the flyby is mainly a test of whether the scientific instruments on board the probe work. Their real target is Jupiter’s asteroids.

‘Lucy’ was launched in 2021 from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida. The 45-foot-long probe, powered by fuel and batteries that can be charged via solar cells, is intended to fly close to seven of the so-called Jupiter Trojans: Eurybates, Queta, Polymele, Leucus, Orus, Patroclus and Menoetius – all named after protagonists from Homer’s ancient legend “Iliad”.

The Jupiter Trojans are asteroids that orbit the sun in the same orbit as Jupiter: one swarm precedes it, one follows it. They are considered ‘fossils of planet formation’. That’s why NASA hopes that the mission will provide new insights into the formation of planets and our solar system.

In addition, “Lucy” will be the first probe in the history of space travel to return close to Earth three times to receive support from Earth’s gravity for its flight. The mission will last twelve years and “Lucy” is expected to travel a total of approximately 4 billion miles.

The probe’s name is taken from the Beatles song “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”. It is said to have blared from a tape recorder when researchers discovered parts of the skeleton of a female prehuman in Ethiopia’s Afar Triangle in 1974. The discovery proved for the first time that the predecessors of today’s humans could walk upright about three million years ago.

The fossil – and now the NASA probe – was nicknamed ‘Lucy’. According to NASA, the reason is simple: “Just as the ‘Lucy’ fossil provided unique insights into human development, the ‘Lucy’ mission promises to revolutionize our knowledge of the formation of the planets and the solar system.” (sda/dpa)