One day after NASA launched the Lucy spacecraft, it announced the craft had problems deploying its solar arrays essential for the mission.

NASA launched the Lucy spacecraft in full PR mode inviting international press and promoting the mission as revolutionary to understanding the solar origins. Unfortunately, a day after a successful launch, Lucy had problems. NASA named the craft Lucy in honor of the famous fossilized human ancestor. The mission’s primary focus is to better better understand the solar system's formation by studying Trojan asteroids.

NASA has experience with ambitious projects that require expensive technology and missions that do not always go as planned. For example, when the Hubble telescope was launched, astronauts had to fly to it and fix its defective mirrors. Recently, NASA has had its share of failures on Mars. NASA admitted defeat on its Insight Lander—a probe that could not penetrate the Red Planet's rocky surface.

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Three days after the launch of Lucy, NASA announced that only one of the solar arrays had fully deployed, while the other one only partially deployed. Lucy was settling into an Earth-orbiting cruise speed while top NASA experts tried to figure out how to solve the problem. The 12-year mission is possible thanks to Lucy’s unique large solar panels—folded like origami to fit into the rocket payload carrier. The large solar panels are designed to harness enough energy for the craft as it moves further away from the sun. Without power, a spacecraft is good as dead.

The latest NASA communications show that experts may be leaning towards their usual style of rolling with the problem due to the impossibilities of fixing it. “That solar array is generating nearly the expected power when compared to the fully deployed wing,” NASA said. So while engineers are looking into the data to understand what went wrong, they are also making calculations to figure out if Lucy will be able to do all the things it is supposed to do in the darker areas of the solar system.

NASA admitted that they still cannot respond to whether the solar array malfunction will have long-term implications for the mission. Fortunately, other programmed tasks like thruster maneuvering and autonomous navigation configurations worked as planned. So it is more than likely that with or without a fully deployed solar array, Lucy will be directed to continue its journey to the swarms of Trojan asteroids. Scientists believe that these asteroids are remnants of the same material that formed giant planets and see them as "fossilized space objects" that hold the keys to understanding the solar system’s evolution.

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