In the question Where is Lucy going? (asteroid mission) I've asked for more clarification on the trajectory of the Lucy mission's trajectory.
I believe that Lucy will simply do a close fly-by of each of these asteroids, rather than stop to smell the roses. Lucy will be in an elliptical heliocentric orbit with a periapsis of 1AU and an apoapsis of about 5.6 AU to go out a little farther than Jupiter's L4/L5 distance from the Sun (see image in that question). That gives Lucy a semi-major axis of 3.3 AU We can calculate the velocities using the vis-viva equation:
$$v^2 = GM \left( \frac{2}{r} - \frac{1}{a} \right).$$
The Sun's standard gravitational parameter is about 1.33E+20 m^3/s^2, and 1 AU is about 1.5E+11 meters, so Lucy's slowest velocity at apoapsis should be only about 6.9 km/s.
On April fool's day 2028 the asteroid 11351 Leucus's state vector will be:
(-3.62, -7.64, -0.20) x 1E+08 km
(10.8, -4.99, 2.41) km/s
which puts it at about 5.6 AU and and 12 km/sec, or 5.1 km/s faster than Lucy assuming they are moving in the same direction.
This means Lucy could be within a million km of the asteroids for four or five days, and so will have to take advantage of good optics to photograph them at long range while they slowly rotate.
I'm guessing this means that Lucy's imaging optics will be very good. These asteroids are much smaller than planets, and so the fast flyby's are really pushing it compared to deep space planetary flyby's.
The Wikipedia article about Lucy mentions:
- L'Ralph - panchromatic and color visible imager and infrared spectroscopic mapper. L'Ralph is based on the Ralph instrument on New Horizons and will be built at Goddard Space Flight Center.
- L'LORRI - high-resolution visible imager. L'LORRI is derived from the LORRI instrument on New Horizons and will be built at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
But "based on" and "derived from" leaves room for substantial improvements since there are 15 years between the two launches.
Question: I'd like to ask about the resolution of Lucy's cameras, and their ability to work during the closest approach of flyby, and what improvements are been made or contemplated in their design and operation based on lessons learned from New Horizons.