How engineers saved NASA’s new asteroid probe when it malfunctioned in space

Photo caption: Lucy, aboard a United Launch Alliance V 401 rocket, launches from Florida in 2021. Photo credit: NASA / Kevin O’Connell and Bob Lausterer. Article by Eva Botkin-Kowacki. Popular Science – August 11, 2022.

Hal Levison was planning to take a nap when he got the bad news. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft rocketed off our planet at 5:34 a.m. on October 16, 2021, so Levison and his team had been up all night preparing. It was a spectacular, “picture perfect” launch, recalls Levison, who is the Lucy mission principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The spacecraft would soon be on its way to the Trojan asteroids, […]

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