NASA’s asteroid hunter soars into sky
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Oct 16, (AP): A NASA spacecraft named Lucy rocketed into the sky with diamonds Saturday morning on a 12-year quest to explore eight asteroids.
Seven of the mysterious space rocks are among swarms of asteroids sharing Jupiter’s orbit, thought to be the pristine leftovers of planetary formation.
An Atlas V rocket blasted off before dawn, sending Lucy on a roundabout journey spanning nearly 4 billion miles (6.3 billion kilometers). Researchers grew emotional describing the successful launch — lead scientist Hal Levison said it was like witnessing the birth of a child. “Go Lucy!” he urged.
Lucy is named after the 3.2 millionyear-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia nearly a half-century ago. That discovery got its name from the 1967 Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” prompting NASA to send the spacecraft soaring with band members’ lyrics and other luminaries’ words of wisdom imprinted on a plaque. The spacecraft also carried a disc made of lab-grown diamonds for one of its science instruments.
In a prerecorded video for NASA, Beatles drummer Ringo Starr paid tribute to his late colleague John Lennon, credited for writing the song that inspired all this.
“I’m so excited - Lucy is going back in the sky with diamonds. Johnny will love that,” Starr said. “Anyway, if you meet anyone up there, Lucy, give them peace and love from me.”
The paleoanthropologist behind the fossil Lucy discovery, Donald Johanson, had goose bumps watching Lucy soar — “I will never look at Jupiter the same ... absolutely mind-expanding.” He said he was filled with wonder about this “intersection of our past, our present and our future.”
“That a human ancestor who lived so long ago stimulated a mission which promises to add valuable information about the formation of our solar system is incredibly exciting,” said Johanson, of Arizona State University, who traveled to Cape Canaveral for his first rocket launch.
Lucy’s $981 million mission is the first to aim for Jupiter’s so-called Trojan entourage: thousands — if not millions — of asteroids that share the gas giant’s expansive orbit around the sun. Some of the Trojan asteroids precede Jupiter in its orbit, while others trail it.
Despite their orbits, the Trojans are far from the planet and mostly scattered far from each other. So there’s essentially zero chance of Lucy getting clobbered by one as it swoops past its targets, said Levison of Southwest Research Institute, the mission’s principal scientist.
Lucy will swing past Earth next October and again in 2024 to get enough gravitational oomph to make it all the way out to Jupiter’s orbit. On the way there, the spacecraft will zip past asteroid Donaldjohanson between Mars and Jupiter. The aptly named rock will serve as a 2025 warm-up act for the science instruments.
Drawing power from two huge circular solar wings, Lucy will chase down five asteroids in the leading pack of Trojans in the late 2020s. The spacecraft will then zoom back toward Earth
for another gravity assist in 2030. That will send Lucy back out to the trailing Trojan cluster, where it will zip past the final two targets in 2033 for a record-setting eight asteroids visited in a single mission.
It’s a complicated, circuitous path that had NASA’s science mission chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, shaking his head at first. “You’ve got to be kidding. This is possible?” he recalled asking.
Lucy will pass within 600 miles (965 kilometers) of each target; the biggest one is about 70 miles (113 kilometers) across.
“Are there mountains? Valleys? Pits? Mesas? Who knows? I’m sure we’re going to be surprised,” said Johns Hopkins University’s Hal Weaver, who’s in charge of Lucy’s black-and-white camera. “But we can hardly wait to see what ... images will reveal about these fossils from the formation of the solar system.”
NASA plans to launch another mission next month to test whether humans might be able to alter an asteroid’s orbit — practice in case Earth ever has a killer rock headed this way.
MOSCOW: Also:
A forthcoming flight to space by a Japanese billionaire will allow the public to have a closer look at life on board the International Space
Station, the president of Space Adventures, a company that organized the flight, said Friday.
Fashion tycoon Yusaku Maezawa is set to rocket to space on Dec 8 on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft together with producer Yozo Hirano, who will film his mission, and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin.
Tom Shelley, the president of Space Adventures, said Maezawa compiled a list of 100 things to do in space during a 12-day mission after asking the public for ideas.
“His intention is to try to share the experience of what it means to be in space with the general public,” Shelley said in an interview with The Associated Press, adding it will include “simple things about daily life to maybe some some other fun activities, to more serious questions as well.”
Maezawa has made his fortune in fashion retail, launching Japan’s largest online fashion mall, Zozotown. His net worth is currently estimated at $2 billion by Forbes magazine.
“I’m so curious, ‘What’s life like in space?’ So, I am planning to find out on my own and share with the world,” Maezawa said in a statement earlier this year.
He and his film producer will be the first self-paying tourists to visit the space station since 2009. The price of the trip hasn’t been disclosed.
PHILADELPHIA: A prominent Bill Cosby accuser filed suit against the actor over a 1990 hotel room encounter in Atlantic City, New Jersey, before the state’s two-year window to file older sexual assault claims expires.
Los Angeles artist Lili Bernard told The Associated Press she was prompted in part by Cosby’s recent release from prison. The 84-yearold Cosby has been free since June, when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned his 2018 sexual assault conviction in another case on procedural grounds.
He had served more than two years of a potential 10-year sentence.
The 57-year-old Bernard says Cosby drugged and raped her in a hotel room after promising to mentor her on his top-ranked TV show. She was 26 at the time.
New Jersey’s two-year window to file sexual assault lawsuits that would otherwise be considered too old to pursue closes next month.
“When Bill Cosby was released, it retraumatized me, it terrified me. I was really horrified for any woman or girl that would come into contact with him,” Bernard told the AP. “The Pennsylvania Supreme Court let a predator back on the streets.”
The Pennsylvania trial judge had classified Cosby as a sexually violent predator subject to lifetime supervision, but that finding became moot when the conviction was overturned, leaving Cosby free of any reporting requirements.
Cosby’s spokesperson said that so-called “look-back” windows like the one passed in New Jersey violate a person’s due process rights.
“This is just another attempt to abuse the legal process, by opening up the flood gates for people who never presented an ounce of evidence,” spokesperson Andrew Wyatt said, noting that Cosby maintains his innocence and would fight allegations to “the highest court in these United States of America.”
Prosecutors in suburban Philadelphia must decide soon whether to appeal the reversal of his conviction in their case to the US Supreme Court.
A jury had convicted Cosby of sexually assaulting Temple University sports administrator Andrea Constand at his home in
January 2004 after incapacitating her with three blue pills. Cosby was arrested in 2015, days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired.
The state Supreme Court said the case should not have gone to trial because Cosby believed he had a binding promise from an earlier prosecutor that he would
Danish police have confiscated a high-performance luxury car after its new owner was caught speeding as he drove it home from Germany to Norway, a northern Danish newspaper reported.
The man, an Iraqi citizen resident in Norway who was not identified, was registered as driving at 236 kph (147 mph) in his Lamborghini Huracan on a stretch of highway where the top speed is 130 kph (81 mph).
Under a new Danish law, police can seize the vehicles of reckless drivers and auction them off, with the money going into Danish coffers. The Nordjyske newspaper said the man had bought the car hours earlier in Germany for 2 million kroner ($310,000).
Jess Falberg, the on-duty officer with the northern Denmark police, told Nordjyske that the owner was “a little annoyed” when the car was seized. (AP)