Lucy will visit a rock in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but her main target is the gas giant’s Trojans.
This spacecraft is the first to target the space rocks that follow the orbit of Jupiter.
“Lucy will profoundly change our understanding of planetary evolution in our solar system,” explained Adriana Ocampo, a planetary scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.
What are Trojan asteroids?
Trojan asteroids are two groups of space rocks that are gravitationally trapped in the same orbit as Jupiter around the Sun and something like a time capsule of the solar system. Their orbits are stable for billions of years because they occupy places known as Lagrangian points (where the gravity of our star and Jupiter cancel each other out, hence this orbital stability).
Lucy will visit more individual objects than any other spaceship
In total, on its 12-year journey, the Lucy spacecraft will visit eight asteroids, including their moons . The spacecraft will observe the composition, shape, gravity and geology of these asteroids for clues as to where they formed and how they came to achieve this very stable orbit.
Will Lucy land on an asteroid?
No, it will not land on any asteroids , but it will move within 965 kilometers of its surfaces at speeds of 3 to 5 meters per second relative to the speed of asteroids through space.
“With Lucy, we are going to eight never-before-seen asteroids in 12 years with a single spacecraft ,” Tom Statler, Lucy project scientist at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. “This is a fantastic opportunity for discovery as we explore the distant past of our solar system.”
Lucy will travel farther from the Sun than any other solar powered spacecraft
Here we find another milestone. Lucy will feed on the Sun but will do so even 850 million kilometers from the star, making it the furthest solar-powered spacecraft in history. To do this, it is equipped with two gigantic solar panels more than 7.3 meters wide and two arrays of 100 sides each.
Why is her name Lucy?
NASA missions are often named after famous scientists (such as DAVINCI +, Kepler, or Hubble) or with acronyms that describe what the mission will do (such as CHEOPS, “Characterizing ExOPlanet Satellite”). Lucy, on the other hand, is named after a fossil. Lucy is the skeleton of a 3.5 to 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis hominid that was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, about 150 kilometers from Addis Ababa. He was about a meter tall, was in his 20s when he died, and weighed about 27 kilos. This skeleton changed the way we saw early hominins, revealing that they could walk upright earlier than previously thought, and is considered an ancestor of all modern hominins, including humans. For this reason, it is considered the grandmother of humanity and its discovery revolutionized the evolutionary tree of our species.
