NASA Stops Trying to Repair Lucy's Troublesome Solar Array
According to NASA, the circular solar array is 98% extended and is powering the Lucy spacecraft, which is now traveling to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids, adequately.
NASA is pausing efforts to deploy a fussy solar array on the Lucy spacecraft because they believe Lucy is too cold and that efforts will be more successful when Lucy is closer to the Sun in December 2024.
One of the two 24-foot-wide (7-meter-wide) solar arrays on the spacecraft, which powers Lucy, failed to fully unfold after launch in October 2021 and remained in an unlatched state. Despite prior attempts by NASA to fully deploy the array, the agency stated in a blog post that the Lucy team will be postponing attempts due to the spacecraft's extreme cold.
However, NASA isn't worried about the situation and estimated in a blog post that the array is 98% deployed and will be strong enough to last the balance of Lucy's 12-year voyage to the mysterious Trojan asteroids that orbit Jupiter both in front of and behind it.
Erin Morton, a NASA communication officer, stated in a post last week that "ground-based tests revealed that the deployment attempts were most successful while the spacecraft was warmer, closer to the Sun." "The team does not expect further deployment attempts to be beneficial under the current circumstances," the statement reads. "The spacecraft is currently 123 million miles (197 million kilometers) from the Sun (1.3 times farther from the Sun than the Earth) and moving away at 20,000 mph (35,000 km/hr).
Soon after the mission's launch, NASA observed problems with the solar array and concluded that they were caused by a loss of tension in the lanyard that was used to unfold the circular array. Lucy is currently hurling away from the Sun and growing steadily colder, but she will make a gravity assist landing on Earth in December 2024. The Lucy crew is currently hoping that the spacecraft will be warm enough to make another attempt.
While Lucy continues its mission to examine Jupiter's Trojan asteroid clusters, the team behind it will be gathering data on the misbehaving solar array to observe how it performs in its slightly disabled state.
