Let’s take a look back at what happened in November 2023 beyond low earth orbit. There was an unexpected discovery by Lucy and an anniversary by Capstone.
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Lucy made an unexpected discovery
On November 1, the Lucy spacecraft had its first planned encounter with an asteroid. Taking it as close as 430 km from the asteroid. For more details, take a look at NASA’s blog post about the fly-by.
The asteroid was only added at the beginning of the year to conduct an engineering test of the spacecraft’s asteroid-tracking navigation system.
It is a small main-belt asteroid designated (152830) 1999 VD57. It later was named Dinkinesh, which is the Ethiopian name for the human-ancestor fossil, also known as Lucy.
Because there was only a small window of about 12 minutes to take images around the closest approach, Lucy didn’t directly send the images back to Earth. Instead, it pointed all its instruments at the asteroid and stored the images for later transmission.
As the teams later analyzed the down linked images, they were in for a surprise. Images revealed that Dinkinesh has a satellite.
Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab
However, images down linked later on provided an even bigger surprise. The satellite is made of two smaller objects touching each other.
This is called a contact binary, and is the first contact-binary satellite ever observed.
What a remarkable start for just a test target.
Lucy is currently on its way back to Earth, where it will get a gravity assist in December next year. The next asteroid encounter is expected for April 2025.
Capstone enters 2nd year in NRHO
On November 13, the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment or CAPSTONE spacecraft entered its second year in a near rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon.
The goal of the mission is to test, if a near rectilinear halo orbit can be used, as predicted, for long-term missions like the lunar gateway space station.