The object of the Lucy mission, named after the Beatles (after the song Lucy in the sky with diamonds) and the fossil skeleton of our human ancestor, is to study Trojan asteroids, a group of space rocks that share the orbit of Jupiter. around the Sun, to learn more about the solar system and the origin of the planets . And it will carry some inspired words from some very famous people when it launches in October 2021: Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, The Beatles, Martin Luther King Jr., among them.
NASA noted that these asteroids, which lie beyond the main asteroid belt , are "in many ways" fossils "from the formation and evolution of planets.
The plaque with the messages was installed on the spacecraft on July 9 at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado. The messages are similar to those that NASA included as part of the Voyager missions in the 1970s.
Unlike the Pioneer and Voyager missions, Lucy will not leave the solar system and head into interstellar space, so the plaque will act as a reminder for future generations of what the mission's purpose was.
When its mission ends in 2033 (after visiting 8 asteroids in 6 independent orbits around the Sun), the Lucy spacecraft will continue to travel between the Trojan asteroids and Earth's orbit for at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, according to states the US space agency itself.
