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Lucy’s mission it derives its nickname from the partial fossil skeleton of the first human ancestors, Australopithecus afarensis, Was discovered in 1974, which changed ideas about the origin and evolution of man. The research team hopes that this spacecraft will support the science of the planet that this skeleton favored paleoanthropology by studying the formation and evolution of our solar system.
In the childhood of the solar system, a debris orbited in a disk orbiting a young sun. Pieces and types of material stuck together, threw snow and reached the neat planets we see today. Asteroids are basically batteries to be thrown out of that process. “They’re surpluses from before the planets existed,” says Tom Statler, a scientist in NASA’s Lucy program.
The study of asteroids compares to the study of pyramids – pyramids, in this metaphor, are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, and are the building material for Trojan asteroids. You will know how these excellent structures were created from a finished triangular product. Search the abandoned construction area and you can conclude much more about their creation. “Objects that eventually became Trojans were created throughout the outer solar system and transported and captured where they are now,” Statler says. “These are some of the remnants that the Trojans dragged and left there.”
And even though our planet is rocky, not a gas giant, studying the outer planets will give us information about how it was created. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that no planet is developing in isolation,” Statler says. “Earth is its way, because the solar system is like that … To understand the earth, we need to understand how other planets were created and developed.”
Lucy will focus on three main tools: L’LORRI, L’TES and L’Ralph. The “L” prefix indicates that they are part of Lucy’s mission because they are based on devices that have flown before. LORRI and Ralph were the ship’s instruments New horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt. “L’LORRI,” then means “Lucy Lorri,” says Michael Vincent, deputy director of space operations at the Southwest Research Institute. OTES OSIRIS-REx spacecraft ra Bennu asteroid, and partly came from an instrument called the TES, which had previously flown in the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. “That’s what we wanted to stick with the devil we knew,” Vincent says. (Also, one of the scientists on the mission is of French descent and Vincent was joking about “trying to classify the place.”)
The L’LORRI camera is basically elegant, sharp enough to take clear photos of craters from 600 kilometers to 200 meters, revealing the history of an asteroid. He can also search for rings and satellites, and help Lucy navigate the asteroids. After all, choosing which point to aim at is far from easy. “Those things aren’t big out there, and we’re going to be divided into lickety,” Vincent says.
L’TES are like the thermometers you would find on Covid-19 projections, but instead of pointing your forehead at the location of an asteroid, it picks up the temperature and detects the infrared radiation that comes out of it. hura. “Over time, you create an overall picture by repeatedly exploring different surfaces,” says Vincent. Their purpose is to measure “thermal inertia,” or to measure how parts of the asteroid are heated or cooled by heating or cooling: it indicates what material it is made of. The sand, for example, keeps the heat on the side of the rock, which you would notice if you took a long walk on the beach in the evening.
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