Hal Levison become once planning to steal a nap when he obtained the noxious news.
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft rocketed off our planet at 5: 34 a.m. on October 16, 2021, so Levison and his crew had been up all night preparing. It become once a spectacular, “represent supreme” delivery, remembers Levison, who’s the Lucy mission necessary investigator from the Southwest Compare Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The spacecraft would rapidly be on its components to the Trojan asteroids, unexplored fossils of the represent voltaic device that take a seat roughly the comparable distance from the solar as Jupiter. These little home rocks, that are notion to get dangle of shaped from the comparable processes that created the planets, can also make clear how our world got here to be.
Nonetheless then, excellent a pair of hours after delivery, the crew got data from Lucy that published that one of her two represent voltaic arrays–which vitality the spacecraft’s programs–hadn’t completely opened. Without both represent voltaic arrays deployed, the crew wasn’t definite Lucy would accumulate it to her supposed destination.
“The traditional mission become once in jeopardy,” Levison says. There might perhaps be no time for a nap. “It become once a in fact laborious day.”
The crew jumped into action to determine what went rotten and to space a resolution. After months of sleuthing thru the details, testing tips on laptop units and spare parts on the bottom, and thinking about different trajectories for the scientific mission, the Lucy engineering crew got here up with a notion, which they disclose into action earlier this summer. Now, the spacecraft’s tough represent voltaic array is practically fully unfurled–enough so as that the mission can continue as deliberate.
“The disclose of the spacecraft is a lot, device more healthy,” Levison says, calling the feat pulled off by the crew’s engineers “fully unbelievable and excellent.”
When the mission engineers first came upon the tell, they didn’t straight away know what had long past rotten. The total data confirmed them become once that one of many represent voltaic arrays hadn’t fully unfurled and latched into disclose. The engineers couldn’t accumulate a visual because Lucy’s cameras point outward. Every little thing got here thru data referring to the spacecraft’s performance.
Lucy’s represent voltaic arrays are take care of gargantuan folding followers. When the spacecraft launched, the arrays were folded up. To deploy them, a motor pulled on a lanyard attached to every array. Then, if it had reached paunchy deployment, a latch would get dangle of held the threshold of the array in disclose, keeping it from transferring.
“What we judge took disclose is somewhere along in the deployment, that lanyard obtained misaligned and got here out of the spool that brings the lanyard in direction of the latching mechanism,” explains Worth Effertz, spacecraft lead engineer for Lucy at Lockheed Martin, which constructed the spacecraft. The crew had no direct data referring to the lanyard being tangled, he adds, however they extrapolated that it “began to dispute on both facet of the spool and originate a form of bundle of lanyard because the motor kept pulling.”