Explore Trojan asteroids of Jupiter | Astronomy.com

In 1974, a team of paleoanthropologists led by Donald Johanson discovered about 40% of his fossilized skeleton. She was a member of the hominid species Australopithecus afarensis and is probably the most famous prehuman fossil in history. Her scientific name is AL 288-1, but everyone knows her as Lucy. The name comes from the famous Beatles song, "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," which Johanson's team listened to at the camp the night of their discovery.

Now, a spaceship bearing his name will travel in the sky in search of scientific diamonds. It will – fly another Beatles song – a long and winding road to get there. But the results are worth it.

For Lucy's mission, it's a second chance. Senior mission researcher Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, notes that a mission named Lucy has been proposed once before. "There was a call in 2010 for new Discovery missions," he says. "One of the proposals was then a mission also called Lucy." This first proposal was based on the New Horizons spacecraft and was a Jupiter Trojan. It has not been approved.

When the next Discovery mission call was launched in 2014, Levison decided to "restart" it with the same name but with a new goal. "The people involved in the first proposal have been rather distracted by New Horizons, as you can imagine," he says. "I decided that it would be a good thing to change the center of the mission a bit and study the Trojan asteroids." NASA's SwRI and Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with Lockheed Martin designing and building the spacecraft.

Lockheed Martin has a long and successful record of spacecraft construction for NASA, including the OSIRIS-REx asteroid return mission, the Mars Odyssey orbiter 2001 and the Mars InSight mission scheduled for 2020. Tim Holbrook is the director assistant program for Lucy. The scientific team, led by Levison and Catherine Olkin, is based at SwRI in Boulder. The Goddard Space Flight Center is NASA's project management facility. Keith Noll is the scientist.