NASA probe captures haunting images of Earth and Moon

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft got its first look Earth-Moon system one year after blasting off from his home planet to explore a distant asteroid swarm. The spacecraft captured beautiful, and somewhat daunting, images of Earth and its natural satellite as it passed through a gravitational attend.

The Spaceship Lucy It is currently on a six-year trip to Jupiter to study the Trojan asteroids, two groups of rocky bodies that lead and follow Jupiter as it orbits the Sun.

As part of his convoluted journeyLucy flew by Earth on October 15 for the first of the three gravity assist maneuvers to place the spacecraft on a new trajectory beyond the orbit of Mars. During her flyby, Lucy took a few pictures of the Earth and the Moon to calibrate the spacecraft’s instruments. NASA released this week’s pictures-and they are really cool, if not a little goosebumps…inducing In addition, they are a preview of the spacecraft’s capabilities and the kind of views that can be expected from the Trojan asteroids.

The first image was taken on October 13, when Lucy was 890,000 miles (1.4 million kilometers) away from Earth. The spacecraft was still moving towards our planet for the close flyby and was able to capture the Earth-Moon system in the same frame.

The Moon can be seen very faint throughout the left side of the image, separated from its host planet by about 238,900 miles (384,400 kilometers). This view of the distant pair challenges our perception of the Moon we see in our night skies, which appears relatively close to us. Instead, the image reveals how far the Moon really is from Earth and the eerie darkness of space between them.

As Lucy neared Earth, she captured this closest look at the planet on October 15 at a distance of 385,000 miles (620,000 kilometers). This view of Earth shows Hadar, Ethiopia:the site of the 3.2-million-year-old hominid fossil for which the spacecraft was named.

Lucy’s fossils provided valuable information about human evolution, just as the Trojan asteroids could help scientists piece together the story of the origin of the first solar system and how it evolved over time.

About eight hours after flying past Earth, Lucy settled with the moon The spacecraft captured this close-up image of the lunar surface on October 16 at a distance of about 230,000 km (140,000 miles) from the surface.

The image, taken with Lucy’s L’LORRI (Lucy Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) high resolution grayscale camera, it was gathered by combining ten two separate millisecond exposures of the same frame to increase its quality, with each pixwhich represents about 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers).

This mosaic of the Moon was created from five exposures spaced one millisecond apart, with each pixel representing approximately 0.7 miles (1.2 kilometers). The upper area of ​​the image was taken before the lower partresulting in the incongruous view of this lunar area. The image was taken about eight hours after Lucy’s flyby of Earth, when the spacecraft was about 230,000 km away from the Moon.

In another close-up image of the Moon, Lucy observed the side of the lunar surface more familiar to us on Earth. Flying between the Earth and the Moon, the captured spacecraft the impact basin filled with Mare Imbrium lava. The lower right area of ​​the image shows the Apennines mmountain range—the landing site of the Apollo 15 mission in 1971.

After Lucy said goodbye to Earth, her new trajectory placed her in a two-year orbit around the Sun. In two years, Lucy will return to Earth for another gravity assist. From here, the spacecraft will still have about three years to reach its first target, the asteroid Donaldjohanson. Later, in August 2027, Lucy will begin her Trojan tour visiting Eurybates and her binary pair Queta, followed by Polymele and her binary pair, Leucus, Orus, and the binary pair Patroclus and Menoetius.

Month: Astronomers chase shadows of Jupiter’s mysterious Trojan asteroids