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NASA’s next asteroid-related mission to explore the early days of our solar system is almost ready to go.
The Lucy the spacecraft is targeting a launch window that opens on Saturday (October 16). After takeoff, the spacecraft will make a 12-year journey to the Outer Solar System, where it will visit half a dozen ancient “Trojans” asteroids this orbit in the same path as the planet Jupiter.
This ambitious mission will include a number of firsts: Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit asteroids in this region and the first to fly over Earth from the Outer Solar System. Additionally, the mission will add new data as scientists seek to learn more about the beginnings of our universe’s history.
“No other space mission in history has been launched to so many different destinations in independent orbits around our sun,” NASA said in a job description. “Lucy will show us, for the first time, the diversity of the primordial bodies that built the planets.”
Related: The Lucy mission to explore 7 Trojan asteroids explained by NASA
Lucy is named after a famous debut Australopithecus skeleton (humanoid) about 3.2 million years old, whose discovery has long been hailed as the keystone of understanding human evolution. The skeleton itself was named after Lucy in the 1967 Beatles song, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” a song excavators danced to during the 1974 expedition that discovered the skeleton, NASA said in a press release 2017 about the Lucy mission.
NASA took inspiration from Lucy’s skeleton, which for the agency represents the beginning of man, by naming a mission that aims to teach us more about the beginnings of our solar system.
“These asteroids are really like diamonds in the sky in terms of their scientific value in understanding how giant planets formed and the solar system evolved,” said Harold Levison, Lucy’s principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), in a press release. NASA Statement 2017. Levison was the one who suggested naming the mission after the skeleton.
Lucy’s 12-year journey will take her to at least eight different asteroids, with three revisits on Earth (two before heading towards the outer solar system and one after) to gain speed with the help of gravity. A small world will be located in the “main belt” of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, while the other seven are Trojans. Notably, four of the seven Trojans are paired, allowing Lucy to see two asteroids simultaneously with each of these particular visits.
The mission will target a range of different types of asteroid bodies: type C (chondrite, common ancient asteroids made of clay and silicate), type D (asteroids with low albedos or reflectivity, which can be rich in organic molecules) and type P (more asteroids with low albedos which can also be rich in organic matter, although we do not yet have samples on Earth to confirm this).
In order, the asteroid targets predicted by Lucy are 52246 Donaldjohanson, 3547 Eurybates and its small satellite Queta, 15094 Polymele, 11351 Leucus, 21900 Orus and the binary 617 Patroclus / Menoetius. Lucie’s website has more details on the type, size and orbit of each asteroid.
“The dark red P and D type Trojans resemble those found in the Kuiper Belt of icy bodies that extends beyond the orbit of Neptune,” NASA officials wrote in the description of the mission. “C-types are mainly found in the outer parts of the main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. All Trojans are believed to be abundant in dark carbon compounds. Under an insulating blanket of dust, they are probably rich in water and other volatile substances.
Flying on Lucy will be several instruments: a visible color imager to determine the composition; a long-range reconnaissance imager to capture high-resolution images of the surface of each asteroid; a thermal emission spectrometer to examine how Trojans retain heat; a terminal location camera to obtain wide field images of asteroids to learn more about their shapes; and a high gain antenna to determine the masses of each of these little worlds.
asteroids and comets represent the small objects left over from the formation of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. Studying the composition, orbits and other dynamics of these small worlds tells cosmologists more about how our neighborhood came into being.
Lucy will also draw on many recent asteroid missions, including that of NASA. OSIRIS-REx mission that is currently heading to Earth with a sample of the asteroid Bennu and Japan Hayabusa2 who returned to Earth in late 2020 with dust from the asteroid Ryugu. Both of these objects are near-Earth asteroids, and comparing this class of space rocks with Lucy’s observations of Trojans could give scientists a new avenue for understanding the solar system.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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