NASA states, “A stubborn solar array on the NASA Lucy mission might yield enough to allow the mission to continue its asteroid-hunting mandate with few issues.”
The agency announced that it has made “significant progress” in handling a solar array on the Lucy mission that was unsuccessful in fully deploying after the spacecraft’s launch, which took place in October 2021. Engineers have been troubleshooting this issue for months.
Lucy consists of two near-circular solar arrays that are each 24 feet across and are constructed to unfold like a fan. The arrays are essential to provide power to the mission, yet one of the arrays confronted a problem in deployment. An update in January stated that” at the time, the second array was a little less than 350 degrees deployed, due to an issue with a lanyard.”
On June 28th Thursday, however, NASA officials stated that the Lucy team was successful in getting the array between 353 degrees and 357 degrees .” The array is under substantially more tension, giving it significantly more stabilization,” agency officials added in a blog post. “The mission team is increasingly confident the solar array will successfully meet the mission’s needs in its current tensioned and stabilized state.”
