After traveling millions of miles over the past two years, the Lucy spacecraft has almost reached its first destination. NASA’s asteroid probe will briefly rendezvous with Dinkinesh in the main asteroid belt on Wednesday to prepare for its future visits of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.
Addy Graham/University of Arizona
After traveling through space for 200 million miles, rocky pieces from asteroid Bennu were dropped off on Earth by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in late September. Now, some of those fragments will be put on display for museum-goers to observe firsthand.
About a month ago, pristine samples from an asteroid landed on Earth while enclosed within a tight capsule. The sample canister was designed to keep the main chunk of the asteroid safe during its journey through space, but now teams at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) are struggling to open it to get at the space…
The Lucy spacecraft is on a 12-year journey to visit eight different asteroids, and it’s almost caught up with the first space rock on its checklist.
NASA concept image
Update: October, 13, 11:17 a.m. ET: Psyche is finally in space. The Falcon Heavy lifted off on time, sending the probe on its 2.2 billion-mile journey to a highly metallic asteroid.
They’ve raced for the moon, they’ve raced for Mars, and now the astronauts of For All Mankind are racing after an asteroid.
The OSIRIS-REx canister still contains the bulk of the asteroid sample inside, but pieces of the ancient space rock found on the outside have already shown evidence of organic matter embedded within tiny bits of debris.
