Hey Scott, I am part of the Lucy Occultation Team and would love to see you cover that aspect of the mission as well. I would be happy to provide context and images.
@@captainmaim - Same skillset and knowledge needed yeah. Doing news videos is probably a LOT less work though. I sort of miss those carefully crafted epic KSP video series, but hey, he found a niche that (I'd imagine) pays a lot better, and he's still damn good at it.
The amount of effort and research that is put into each video is absolutely astounding... We don't give Scott enough credit for what he provides for us.
agreed and all of that without 5min introduction and 10min outro of a sponsor of the content, he's not making living out of it, I get it but frankly, his videos are of better quality than some people on YT that are doing it for living. Respect.
Incredible to see how you can fine-tune your mission design to hit multiple targets on the same mission. One of the more ambitious multi-target missions since the Voyager Probes! Super excited for the science that will come out of it!
In the early 2000s there was the CONTOUR mission, which would have flown by a handful of different comets. But it experienced structural failure during activation of its solid fueled kick stage.
I would like to see a cheap (perhaps a cubesat-like thing, with some ion thruster for high specific impulse), mass produced probe. Build a few hundreds of them, and send them all over the solar system, to explore and image thousands of asteroids and KPO. Let's find where this damn black monolith is hidden.
Building cost of a spacecraft is just one component in the total mission price. You also need a ground crew, and you have to put that stuff in orbit. Putting something into orbit is about as expensive as that same mass of gold on earth. So while a probe for only 1/4 the price sounds good, it doesn't change the total mission cost by that same factor. (At least, until Elon builds his Space Elevator in like 2040 or something like that ;) )
There's also the problem that space is big. Really, truly, mind-bogglingly big. So the chances of this shotgun spread of probes managing to get close to... anything at all, would be pretty slim. However there might be something to the concept of having standard mass-produced probes that can be kept on hand to be shot at anything of interest that floats through a launch window.
@@Garagantua That's the idea. I think a spaceship could send a lot of cubesat-like probes in a high elliptic orbit. Then, each one will do its own slingshot maneuver, using parts of its fuel to be launched at the right time in the right direction. We don't care if the need 10-20 years to reach their target, or if some of them are lost. But either we make giant space interferometer telescopes, or we send tiny cheap probes en masse. There are thousands of objects in the solar system and we don't know what they are until we send something around it.
@@Garagantua Just as an FYI, even Starship - humanity's first prototype fully reusable rocket system - will be cheaper than the most optimistic projections for a space elevator. Space elevators aren't cheap. What they do do is allow you to massively expand the amount of material heading up and down compared to rockets. It would only take a few hundred Starship launches (and reentries) per day to dramatically change the energy balance of Earth's upper atmosphere. Any reasonably sized spacefaring civilization would need at the very least 10s of thousands of launches per day, not hundreds. Space elevators allow you to do that kind of thing without wrecking the upper atmosphere. But they're not cheap and they take a long time to get to GEO and then back down again. Not only will they never be cheaper than reusable rockets, they'll never be used for human transportation (too slow).
The older I get the more it hits home that I'm reaching the age where I may no longer be around to see the final targets of these long-term missions. I envy you kids out there, appreciate all this discovery!
The mission dates take on a whole new importance for me now. But there will always be more when I am long ashes. I'm just so thankful to have lived from the beginning of the Space Race to the recent space science explosion. In my lifetime we went from believing civilizations on Mars to the real thing, Voyagers, and so much more (Hubble!). Really counting on smooth journey and operation of the JWST!
Lol, for sure. IMO, he earned it though. Every time I start trying to learn the maths of orbital mechanics, I forget which way is up... Or is there an "up"?
While I understand Lucy is an important skeleton and Johanson is an important figure, Lucy was not the first australopithecine found. The first specimen, the Taung child, was described by Australian anatomist Dr Raymond Dart in 1924, and was the first early hominin found. Further it was Dart who proposed "Australopithecidae" from which all Australopithecus, including Lucy get their classification. And Dr. Dart was the uncle of my best friend from Law School.
I'm just commenting not criticizing. NASA named the mission Lucy because the first asteroid to visit is Donald Johansen and the name flowed from there and is appropriate. I just like giving Dr. Dart a shout out as it was he who created the field of study.
@@damianl3 No, they named the main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson after the Lucy mission was selected and specifically because the Lucy spacecraft was going to fly by it.
@@somewherenorthofstarbase7056 I dunno bub I watched the entire series and Ricky would cross his arms say that line and Lucille would make that face when her plans didn’t work out
Hahahaha! I was just thinking the same thing! I'm 60 and for the first time I actually started thinking whether or not if I'll be alive to see the end of the mission!lol!
SCOTT MANLEY, THANK YOU!!! My wife and I visited the National Museum of the United States Air Force over the past weekend and because of your channel and the Everyday Astronaut channel, I have become a serious fan of all things space related. I have learned so much over the past couple years and even though I visit the USAF Museum at least once, sometimes 2 or 3 times, each year, I normally just glance over the rocket related areas of the museum. Not this time! I stood there in the Missile Gallery amazed, and then on to the next area to check out the massive 'spy' satellite and its launch vehicle, the impressive Titan IVb. Unlike past visits to this museum as well as previous visits to the NASA Space Launch Complex at Cape Canaveral and the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, I had a much deeper understanding of what I was looking at, how and why a particular rocket body or engine was designed and made and so much more. So thank you for expanding my knowledge and, I am sure, doing the same for countless others!
Interesting that the missions even has potential scope beyond 2033 and the mission instruments were developed using the lessons learned by other recent missions, such as New Horizons.
Such a giant mission, however the majority of it is transition with not a lot of observations. So will love to learn about it's encounters. Other traveling missions are getting closer: BepiColumbo, Solar Orbiter...
Can we get a video about your University work some day? Given your fascination with space and asteroids in particular, it would be interesting to hear about
This is going to be a literal ten year mission for the probe. It fascinates me that there could be a revolving door of mission team members that would either retire before it gets to Patroclus or just barely into college when this thing launches.
I don't get the two earth assists though. The options were add another 5 years or extend the rocket 8 inches for more propellant. That is some seriously cheap stuff right there.
This reminds me of the expedition of the solar system that the voyager probes did in the 1970s-now just with asteroids this time. Whoever first worked out the math for this mission's route and figured out it was feasible is awesome.
It's definitely some impressive planning, no doubt. But my guess is that they set a rough course that would allow them to hit both sets of Trojans and then picked targets that fit along the path. Like how you don't plan a road trip as a series of gas stations, you just pull over when you could use a fill up.
You should do a video about before and after, artist impressions to real data, of many objects, including planets, planetoids, comets, asteroids, etc..
On this episode of Space Gear: May starts his own space launch company, Hammond installs an inertial guidance system backwards, And Clarkson speeds and powers his way into orbit!
Awesome summary of the mission, thank you. Space is big, it’s hard to grasp the scale until you think about 7 years from launch to arrival at the target. We are a very long away from human deep space travel.
Why does Lucy not use an Ion engine? When you're trying to get the most from your fuel mass for long missions like this, it has become pretty standard to use an Ion engine.
@@TlalocTemporal It's a space mission, everything about it is already expensive. I'd be amazed if the cost of the Xenon was significant, and even if it is you can use Krypton instead. Not as good (less mass per volume) but cheaper, I believe some space agency has used it for that reason.
What I think: An Ion-engine is more for propulsion to and from an object (like Mars or Venus). Long duration burns to get into the correct trajectory and long duration burns to brake to get into orbit. Lucy needs nothing of this. The speed can easily be reached with gravity assists. The engine on board is more for course, small course corrections and is better suited than an Ion-engine.
@@ablereplay But Scott pointed out a large amount of the mass of the spacecraft is fuel. That's a lot for trajectory correction manoeuvres and I'd like to see an actual explanation for not using an ion engine rather than speculation.
I wonder if 52246 Donaldjohanson bigger than 33434 Scottmanley... While us lowly viewers are stuck at comparing our gentleman's sausages, these men can whip out their asteroids and go Ha, mine is bigger!
Minor correction, but Lucy is not an ancient human. Lucy is an Australopithecus, which is in the subfamily hominin. That subfamily includes both humans (I can’t give their genus name because RU-vid will delete the comment) and Pan, which includes chimps and bonobos. So Lucy is very closely related to humans, but not classified as such.
@@timothy8428 when I tried to write it the first time it errored out and the post got deleted. No idea if it was because I only said the genus and not species? I have no idea. Either way I wasn’t going to risk it again.
Speaking of asteroid belts, its important to note that the main belt or the Trojans are not thick with objects like we see in The Empire Strikes Back. With that in mind (and acknowledging the fantastical nature of the film) what do you think the "Asteroid Field" in the movie could be? A ring system? A debris field from a recent collision of planets or moons? Something else? Just thought of it while watching the video.
At least! If in the next 10 years we find another asteroid it's able to reach after that final Earth encounter, this mission could still be doing work in 2039 at least!
I'm really looking forward to the LUCY mission, and to the PSYCHE mission that will launch in 2023 too. They were both selected out of a total of five missions by NASA. Last week we did also have the first out of nine Mercury flyby's of the ESA-JAXA mission Bepicolombo. Soon the James Webb Space telscope will also finaly launch. Desiny+ (JAXA), Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (ESA) and the Okeanos mission (With solar sail) are also coming up !! These are such exciting times for us space lovers. :-)
amazing they can figure all that out for only 1700m delta v, (i think that was the number) i went to minmus with more just because i like drop tanks lol
Just thinking about these imaging telescopes flying around in deep space for years before they get to their destination, I wonder if NASA could offload some science time to people wanting to use space telescopes. Obviously they don't have the mirror size of hubble, but I bet the cameras are better and they could give lots of integration time. Might as well put it to good use while it takes 2 years to get where it is going, and the intermediate time between part 2 of the mission.
The combination of mirror size and instrument loadout makes them ill suited for deep space observation compared to even "mediocre" ground based telescopes.
@@rocketsocks I'm thinking for more deep field views. The reason Hubble was able to take it's deep field shots was due to the completely lack of sky glow and the ability to take ultra long shots. Even the darkest skies on earth easily over whelm the light from very distant galaxies. I am sure that if it was made available, some astronomer would find some use for the instruments that you or I probably wouldn't have ever thought of.
I was on the Max Brewer Bridge watching the launch - it was pretty cool how it peered through the clouds and lit up the dark sky. Hoping they find a solution for the solar array issue because Lucy has lots of work to do! Great video - very informative!
So happy to see Jacob Englander as first author on the paper Scott showed. He wrote an amazing program called EMTG (Evolutionary Mission Trajectory Generator) for generating trajectories for low-thrust ion drive missions. Just for my personal interest in the problem, I reached out to him seven years or so ago, and he very generously gave me a copy. He said that he was glad to, since "a few years ago, I was an amateur and in the same boat you are now."
Yeah I don't know any other science educator who'd go digging for "lucy in the sky with a diamond" thing. They just don't know enough stuff and they don't care enough to investigate.
Excellent video (as usual), especially the bit at the end about "Lucy in the sky with *A* diamond". Minor correction: Lucy wasn't human. She was a member of a *pre-human* hominin species known as Australopithecus Afarensis.
@@scottmanley it's like the dissynchronized (desynchronized?) orbital period of the Beatles and Star Trek have brought them back, not together, but opposed.
One little girl, Lucy Williams, inspired a drawing by Julian Lennon, which inspired the Beatles song, which in turn gave the name to the human fossil, which is what the name of the space probe is based on... Quite an influential toddler.
Lucy is in the sky!! Amazing launch, gorgeous night view like sunrise when the Atlas was coming out of a low cloud layer. Must see! She is separated, solar panels unfolded, they have AOS, and she's in her solar orbit at 40,000 km/h, to reach a top speed of 644,000 km/h after the gravity assists (she never needs to slow down). See you in a year, Lucy, and thanks for the iconic launch!
You guys are all such high achievers. I am on intellectual high if I manage to pull of a fart without skittering/skid-marks/poop lines in my boxer shorts.
Even then I am doubly proud of myself if I manage to wear those “tighty whitey’s / boxer shorts” without scratching my bum hole throughout the day - again resulting in poo transfer from the finger covering fabric to the fabric itself; a skid mark.
Scott How does "antenna" power work? I mean if voyager can still transmit. It would seem that the signals are boundless. Why do some craft need larger antenna if it is this easy?
Voyager can transmit a few bits per second to antennas many 10s of meters across. Not even enough for a picture. There is a whole engineering field about channel capacities, coding for error correction, and another accounting for the power beam forming which is used for space and earth radio transmission.
Also amazed at the casual mention of a rocket engine made by a BRITISH company! I had no idea we made such things - we don't exactly have a highly visible space programme...
Apparently we've been making rockets since the 1950s (quite a few developed near where I live) and then there's all the satellite tech we develop too... We just don't like to shout about it like that brash South African does 😉😂
@@iansandon8057 I remember our 'space programme' well - I think we were the fourth of fifth country to put a satellite up. But the government cancelled it immediately after, so I'd assumed that was that. I know we've got a small high-tech satellite I industry now, but I had no idea we built rocket engines!
@@paulhaynes8045 my apologies, i didn't intend to teach you to suck eggs 😉 Yes, the government in the 1950/60s made some spectacular decisions (first to get into, and then immediately out of, the space race!) I believe the company behind the SABRE engine, as well as a couple of other light rocketry companies, also have some testing facilities at Westcott (might have been sharing with Nammo, but I don't think so).
Excellent presentation! After being exposed to space exploration and orbital mechanics through Kerbal Space Program, my brain just went bananas with amazement when you showed the sequence of orbits and the different targets for the mission. I've never before thought about, let alone been able to remotely appreciate, what goes into this. And even then I'm just scratching the surface.
Did you render the spacecraft yourself in blender, Scott? That looks awesome! PS if not, can you please leave a reference where you get those graphics from?
I know there are a lot brilliant minds and sofisticated computers planning this type of mission but it never ceases to amaze me how insane those encounters and gravity assists work.. it's insane
Gravity assist saves fuel, but makes missions soooo long. I look forward to the day when we have a propulsion system which can do away with gravity assists.
There's also the possibility that in addition to the one on the craft itself the asteroids also contain some amount of carbon crystals, so the song could come into play that way as well. :)
Thanks Scott, thank you for sharing. There is a science fiction book by Wi1liam H MacHinery about 4 Vesta and the 90 Antiope binary asteroid pair. Unfortunately, the book isn't well written, but the ideas are awesome. Imagine erecting a canopy over the surface of these binaries, 15 km high, and covering the canopy with 1 km of stone rubble. the weight of the rubble would be offset by an inflated atmosphere of 15 psi, creating a world within a world, a very small pressure gradient throughout the volume, allowing human powered flight, as well as protection from small meteorite hits and radiation. This same habitat could be constructed at the binary Trojan 617 Patroclus with its satellite Menoetius. Let's go take a look!
If we make and use ALOT of space miner drones with mini robots inside that help with repairs and transportation, we could have endless minerals from asteroids.
Couple of years later... -What 's up? -Lucy...Yet another dumb rock..taking pictures... -Aaaaaa guys.... -What? -That rock... is not a rock... -??? -Those look like klingon letters to me....
Scott this video is incredible, some history, some technical rocket details, some spectroscopy details, some orbital mechanics. Amazing. I will probably be watching this a few more times to soak it all in!
Hello, Scott, thanks for the great video! I have a question, which arose from watching it. There is a piece of footage where they unfold the solar panel placed horizontally back in the lab. And I am querious about how they design those things. I presume that in space you do not need the same level of durability as you need in the lab to unfold a folded panel and fight the gravity. So there must be some excessive weight in the design which you do not need out there? Obvious (nowdays) solution would be to build spaceships in space and someone would once do it. But what about older days? Did they have some droppable supports on, say, Vouager? Or they do propel all that “lab gravity” weight with them?
But isn't Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, actually a reference (poetic) to LSD? And of course there's lots of LSD on board Lucy. Those are just Light Sensitive Detector(s). It's sent to space on a ROCKET = Reactive Oxygen Combustion Kinetic Energy Transport. This is fun (Fictitious Unification of Nouns).
