Ralph, one of NASA’s most successful scientific tool, made a long flight and performed many tasks: as part of the New Horizons mission, Ralph received fascinating pictures of Jupiter and his satellites as he passed by a giant planet system; after that, Ralph made a visit to Pluto and filmed for the first time in high resolution of this legendary dwarf planet. And in 2021, Ralph was sent on a Lucy mission to the Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.
Ralph, however, is not at all a deserved NASA astronaut — he is a scientific tool that helped make many discoveries since the first launch into space aboard the New Horizons probe in 2006. This tool, which is not an acronym, allows you to study the composition of the substance and the atmosphere of celestial bodies.
The Lucy spacecraft is equipped with the twin instrument Ralph camera called L Ralph. This tool will allow you to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that have survived from the early days of the solar system history. The Ralph L toolbox will help you explore this diverse group heavenly bodies; Lucy will fly past six Trojan asteroids and one asteroid of the Main Belt. The L Ralph tool will detect the characteristic spectral features of the substance of Trojan asteroids.
The Lucy mission will study Trojan asteroids using the following tools: Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (L LORRI) cameras, Thermal Emission Spectrometer spectrometer (L” TES), and L Ralph instruments. The L LORRI imaging device will provide images of Trojans The high resolution spectrometer L ”TES will analyze the heat generated by the surfaces of Trojan asteroids. The L Ralph instrument, meanwhile, will allow scientists to interpret data on sunlight reflected from surfaces of cosmic stones, which contain characteristic spectral features of the various elements and chemical compounds. These data will help scientists understand how the formation of organic molecules in primitive bodies could occur – a process that could also lead to the emergence of life on Earth.
The L Ralph toolkit includes a Multi-spectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) and Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) cameras, and the tool allows you to conduct observations in both the optical and infrared ranges. Compared to the New Horizons Ralph instrument , the L’Ralph instrument can analyze a wider band of the electromagnetic spectrum and is equipped with a moving mirror that allows you to collect reflected light without having to move the entire spacecraft. The L’Ralph IR detector detectors have an area of 2000×2000 pixels, which is much larger than compare the instrument matrix Ralph, whose size is only 256 x 256 pixels.
A spacecraft with scientific tool Ralph sent to Trojan asteroids
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