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NASA launches Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds
Today NASA launched a spacecraft to explore asteroids around Jupiter. The spacecraft is carrying a disc of diamonds in one of it’s instruments to be used in the mission. NASA named the spacecraft Lucy, and adorned it with a plaque with the Beatles lyrics for “Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds”.
“A Nasa spacecraft named Lucy has rocketed into the sky with diamonds on a 12-year quest to explore eight asteroids.
An Atlas V rocket blasted off before dawn on Saturday, sending Lucy on a roundabout orbital journey spanning nearly 4bn miles (6.3bn km). “I’m just elated,” Nasa’s associate administrator, Robert Cabana, said after liftoff. “This is the coolest darn mission.”
Lucy is named after the 3.2m-year-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor found in Ethiopia nearly half a 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 carries a disc made of lab-grown diamonds for one of its science instruments.
In a prerecorded video for Nasa, the Beatles drummer, Ringo Starr, paid tribute to his late colleague John Lennon, credited for writing the song.
“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.”
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56 Replies
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The next time I see Jupiter and it’s moons in the night sky, I will know there is something of the Beatles out there flying in between the moons, Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds. That’s pretty cool. I feel Janitor Joe is out there too!
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Don’t forget George & George.
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I love the trajectory that was designed for this mission!
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David, wow that is a complex trajectory Lucy is taking. It travels all over the solar system it seems. I couldn’t imagine what the math equation for that trajectory would look like. It would be interesting to see though.
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Here’s a tool for planning a trip. I wonder if Janitor Joe used it(?).
https://trajbrowser.arc.nasa.gov/traj_browser.php
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It’s really just a series of elliptical loops, with the size and shape and orientation of the ellipse being changed by Earth’s gravity during each flyby of Earth. It looks weird partly because it’s shown in a frame of reference that co-rotates with Jupiter, so that Jupiter’s orbital motion around the Sun is subtracted out.
But yeah, I wouldn’t want to have to work with the equation for that shape, nor I imagine would anyone at NASA! I’m sure they just ran simulations and tweaked them until Lucy ended up in the right places at the right times.
By the way, Jung, very nice looking photo of Jupiter and its moons!
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Hi David, thanks for the description of the trajectory. If I understand correctly: Lucy, once accelerated, follows its trajectory, then is deflected by the gravitational pull of Jupiter or one of its trabants/ satellites, and so follows an elliptical curve until it re-enters the gravitational zone of another celestial body (e.g. Earth), to be deflected again, and so on (a bit like the bumper in a pinball machine, only smoother and with a gentle curve)? What will eventually happen to the spacecraft? Will it leave our solar system and disappear into the vastness of space, or will it be completely attracted by the gravity of a celestial body and end its existence there with a Small Bang? Does Lucy actually have its own propulsion system (for example control nozzles) or does it only receive a one-time energy pulse at launch?
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That’s exactly right, Juergen! Lucy is constantly in orbit around the Sun, but along a path that causes it to have repeated close encounters with the Earth that transfer kinetic energy from Earth’s orbit to that of the spacecraft. (They call it a “gravitational slingshot”.) Lots of interplanetary probes these days use this sort of maneuver to save on fuel. You need fuel to lift the weight of the payload, and more fuel to lift the weight of the first fuel, etc. So using the gravity of the planets to accelerate the craft makes the mission vastly cheaper.
Lucy does have small maneuvering thrusters to fine-tune its trajectory occasionally to compensate for small errors in performance or uncertainties in the calculations, but generally speaking its long-term path is already locked in. It’s just coasting now.
Two years ago I attended a public talk given by one of the mission scientists, and afterward I asked her your very question about Lucy’s ultimate fate. She said it will continue looping back and forth between Earth’s orbit and Jupiter’s orbit. And if the spacecraft remains healthy and funding for an extended mission is approved, Lucy could keep encountering and examining asteroids for several more decades!
Sorry that I’ve taken this thread off on a tangent, but for me, space exploration and MLT music both show off the best that humanity has to offer!
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David, we appreciate the information !
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Hi David, thanks for the detailed answer. You did it just right: You took us on a small, interesting journey out into the vastness of our solar system and then led us back to earth via a loop at the right moment, to MLT and to the music. Lucy couldn’t have done it better. Thanks. 🙂
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David, always love hearing your insight into these things! Thanks for the explanation of the Lucy project. When we look out towards Jupiter the Beatles influence will be out there as “Lucy In The Sky with Diamonds” lyrics sling shots across the night sky between the moons for many decades to come.
BTW, thanks, that that is a cropped image from one of the photos I took from my zoom camera in the spring of Jupiter. I think I will need something more powerful to capture Lucy in the coming years! 🙂
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Hi Jung, thank you for the interesting topic. This only appears as a marginal note in our media landscape. Nice, then The Beatles are now also storming the Top Ten in the cosmos: First placement for the song “Across The Universe” and later they will probably get their own star in the Walk of Milkyway- Fame.
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Thanks Jurgen. The Beatles are literally making a mark in space, and Across The Universe is also a very fitting song for them. I haven’t heard this rough version before, thanks for posting it. I always enjoy hearing different stages of their songs.
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Thanks Jung. We recently had the topic: Phil Spector and “The Wall of Sound”. The album version is backed with choirs and orchestra, almost a bit too much of a good thing. This version, on the other hand, sounds “very naked”. Such a middle thing would be nice. Admittedly: complaining on the highest level.
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Remarkably in recent years it has become very quiet around NASA. For cost reasons, many projects have been put on ice. As far as I understand it, the goal of the Lucy mission is to study eight planetoids at close range between 2025 and 2033.
Stanislaw Lem, a Polish physicist and science fiction author, lets his protagonist in his novel “Solaris” come to the realization that we humans follow only one goal in all our attempts to explore space: We are in search of ourselves. Who are we, where do we come from and where will we go? The attempt to explore the planets, the desire to understand the universe: is it really only about the question “why”? What do you think about it?
Stephen Hawking describes in his book “A Brief History of Time” how he approached the Big Bang with his calculations up to a few milliseconds (or maybe even less) and how he tried to develop a formula (World formula) to be able to go back to the second zero. He held the opinion that if we can go all the way back to the Big Bang, everything will be easy. The calculations, the answers and our understanding of the Cosmos. He called this „origin and destiny of the universe“. Is also the program Lucy in the end only a trace search? What do we hope to find out there? Minerals or knowledge and insights into our own being? That the probe and the project were named after Lucy is surely no coincidence.
SETI is another exciting project of NASA, what has actually become of it? If we do find „E.T“. (the Extra-Terrestrial), will he (or it, or them) have answers for us and will we like them?
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Jürgen,
Seti.org has one of the free newsletters I currently subscribe to. They’re still around.
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I didn’t know NASA was cutting back on missions. Here’s a listing of their missions.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/
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i was never a Bowie fan but It looks like Space Oddity benefits from a great video.
Nice job Jurgen.
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Thanks Tom, I feel the same way as you: I really like the song Space Oddity in combination with the video. I also thought about buying the complete David Bowie album, but I don’t like the rest of the songs on the album as much.
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Hi Jurgen,
I hope NASA resumes space exploration again. The mysteriousness of space always blows my mind when I start going down that wonderful rabbit hole of “why and how”. I’ve always felt like we are just looking at a huge curtain that appears to our senses as reality and a vast universe, but there is something behind it, if we can only find a way to look behind it, or draw the curtain open, or turn our head back fast enough. The “Big Bang” theory also fascinates me, that all the mass, energy, space and time that make up this vast universe originated from a single microscopic/sub atomic point, and some theories state the universe will ultimately expand and collapse back into that point again. So then the question is what was before the big bang, and what is there beyond space and time, and on and on.
Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets look intriguing in that video! Cool how they shake hands with all the different aliens. I see it was a 2017 movie. Will watch it if I can, it’s the kind of sci-fi movie I like. Thanks for letting me wonder in awe about the universe.
I suddenly crave some MLT Starman now!
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Hi Jung, thanks for the very nice metaphor “The mysteriousness of space always blows my mind when I start going down that wonderful rabbit hole of “why and how”. I even go so far as to say that there is not only a rabbit hole waiting for us, but a whole wormhole. 🙂
“Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets” will definitely please you. The plot is rather average, but exciting (but Star Wars is no different). Visually an absolute pearl. And it’s peppered with Luc Besson’s typical humor. Really great. Maybe you also know the movie “Le Cinquième Élément” (The Fith Element). It’s the same style of film and the same kind of humor.
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Valerian is currently free on the streaming service I subscribe to.
JWST has found some things that have people asking questions about the Big Bang theory. Like how is it possible to have full blown, mature galaxies so soon after the Big Bang? No one has an answer for that one yet. JWST is going to upset a few more theories before it’s done too I’m sure.
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Chris, here’s an interesting article discussing the early massive galaxy issue:
https://www.space.com/james-webb-space-telescope-didnt-break-big-bang-explained
space.com
No, the Big Bang theory is not 'broken.' Here's how we know.
Researchers confirmed that the distant galaxies discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope are, indeed, perfectly compatible with our modern understanding of cosmology.
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Thanks. Yeah, I had heard that someone was using a more accurate way to measure that distance.
There are stories of scientists who worked for decades only to have their theories debunked. That must not be fun at all. Any theory as entrenched as the Big Bang would certainly need a lot of evidence to get people to desert it. And as the author was saying, it’s still too early to know if the Big Bang, or any other theory, is really in need of a repair, large or small. We will see.
But that’s why we build these things, we need evidence. One of my favorite theories involves 95% of the contents of the universe, dark energy + dark matter. And we have no idea what they are.
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I’ve heard several people hail this one-hour video as one of the most insightful layman-level lectures ever presented about the big bang:
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Hi David, thanks for the video on Big Bang. I will enjoy the lecture, although in smaller doses: a one-hour lecture on the subject in English: hard stuff 🙂 But the topic is presented in a very entertaining and easy to understand way. Great!
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Hi David, that is a very interesting video, thanks for sharing it. When he starts talking about a flat versus curved closed universe, I can see parallels to 600 years ago when Columbus theorized the earth was round and not flat. Interestingly the video ends with the assertion by the speaker that the universe is in fact expanding at an accelerating rate. In 2014, 5 years after this video, some scientists now theorize the universe is not expanding but collapsing.
https://phys.org/news/2015-03-universe-brink-collapse-cosmological-timescale.html
“Physicists have proposed a mechanism for “cosmological collapse” that predicts that the universe will soon stop expanding and collapse in on itself, obliterating all matter as we know it. Their calculations suggest that the collapse is “imminent”—on the order of a few tens of billions of years or so—which may not keep most people up at night, but for the physicists it’s still much too soon.”
It’s all quite mind boggling. On a cosmic scale, it’s “much too soon”. 🙂
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Here is a piece of music that will always be very special to me: Jean Michel Jarre is a fantastic pioneer of electronic music and his style has always been associated with space, infinite journeys through the universe and departure to distant planets. Space travel has never sounded more exciting and beautiful.
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One of my earliest music purchases was Oxygene! His dad was a film composer, I believe. Also Michael Hoenig, who I think was with Tangerine Dream for awhile
https://youtu.be/SuM_vOBIc6shttps://youtu.be/SuM_vOBIc6s
Speaking of tangerine dreams, the thought of the lyrics to “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” flying into deep space starts me dreaming of one day when a giant spaceship lands on Earth and the aliens who emerge demand to see our kaleidoscope-eyed women.
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David, The Oxygene music is so soothing. I really like that kind of out of this world music like Tangerine Dream. George Winston is another, the magic he can do with the piano keys like this one. You never hear the piano played like that at the very top of the scale.
Who knows in the distant future how people will evolve, perhaps the aliens might find us with kaleidoscope eyes.
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Hi Jung, good point about the aliens finding evolved humans. No telling how long Lucy could be flying around out there before she’s tripped over by some intergalactic traveler.
The happy version has them coming to Earth to find huge cellophane flowers of yellow and green and girls with kaleidoscope eyes.
The unhappy version has Lucy dutifully sending data back for millennia before she’s discovered, leading the aliens to make the trip to Earth, only find the planet a dead clump of radioactive mud.
The trippy version has Lucy discovered hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Earth years later. Her extraterrestrial discovers are thoroughly stumped by the strange markings, but intrigued enough to investigate. Just as they are about to launch an exploratory ship, their wise old AI quantum supercomputer explores some ancient texts and announces that the planet to which they are about to travel is none other than the birthplace of their distant ancestors.
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Hi David, wow some pretty imaginative scenarios. I like the first scenario the best, but your vivid descriptions of all 3 scenarios remind of that 60s classic song In the Year 2525. The way things are going with virtual reality technology and AI (artificial intelligence) doing everything for us, I envision a 4th scenario, which I hope does not happen, and that is the Matrix. Remember the Matrix with Keanu Reeves? We just become brains in a petri dish connected into a virtual reality world, like the Star Trek Holodeck. Come to think of it, if that were the case now and we’re all living in a Matrix world, we wouldn’t know the difference anyway. Hmmm…
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I think Jarre was on Hearts of Space a lot back in the day.
Well what do you know. they are still around.
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Thanks Tom. What is “Hearts of space” exactly? A streaming service specializing in meditative and electronic music or still an independent record label? Jarre was very popular in Europe and Asia. He also gave several big live concerts. This was rather unusual at that time for this kind of music. Unfortunately, he never managed to match the great success of his two albums “Oxygen” and “Equinox”. At the moment he seems to be planning another comeback. This time in Germany.I wish him much success.
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Hearts of Space started out on radio – NPR- back in the eightys, pre-web.
It moved to the web sometime in the late 90’s.
Check it out. take your time.
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Hi Jurgen, what a cool video and music! Thanks. The graphics are incredible. My brother had the Jean Michel Jarre Oxygene album in his collection I recall. The album sounds very familiar. I can feel the wonder and awe of traveling in space watching that video with the music.
In the same vein, but the video is not as spectacular as Oxygene, one of my fave space travel songs from the 70s. In fact one of the big auto manufacturers used this song in one of the car commercials years ago. I use to like listening to this as I buried the throttle in my old mustang! It felt like space travel too.
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Thanks Jung, very nice music and great pictures. Could you lend me your Mustang occasionally times so that I also come to the full enjoyment? 🙂
PS: when I fully depress the gas pedal on my car, it also eventually takes off, but less controlled than Lucy.
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Is this what Lucy saw when she left Earth’s orbit? And if she were human, what do you think Lucy would have felt and thought when she saw these images?
(? Probe Lucy: neutrum or femininum? )
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…and will this be what Lucy discovers…?
(The video can be rotated with the cursor keys at the top left, or with the mouse).
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