NASA's next asteroid-bound mission is almost ready for launch. It will explore the early days of our solar system.
The launch window for the Lucy spacecraft opens Saturday, Oct. 16. The spacecraft will launch on Saturday, Oct. 16, and will travel 12 years to the outer solar systems, where it will visit half of the "Trojan", an ancient asteroids orbiting in the same orbit as Jupiter.
The ambitious mission will bring Lucy to the surface of asteroids in the region. It will also be the first spacecraft to fly by Earth from the outer solar systems. The mission will also provide new data for scientists who seek to understand the early history of our universe.
NASA stated in a mission description that "no other space mission has been launched to such many destinations in independent orbits around the sun" and added that no other mission had ever done so. "Lucy will reveal for the first-time the diversity of the primordial body that created the planets."
NASA explains the Lucy mission to discover 7 trojan asteroids
Lucy was named after an early australopithecine humanoid skeleton, which is approximately 3.2 million years old. Its discovery has been long hailed as a major breakthrough in understanding the evolution of humans. NASA stated in 2017 that the skeleton was named after Lucy, a 1967 Beatles song. This song was used by excavators during the 1974 expedition to uncover the skeleton.
NASA took inspiration from Lucy's skeleton to name a mission to learn more about the origins of the solar system.
In a 2017 NASA statement, Harold Levison, principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) said that "these asteroids really do look like diamonds in space in terms of their scientific worth for understanding how the huge planets formed and evolved." Levison suggested that the mission be named after the skeleton.
Lucy's twelve-year journey will take her to at least eight asteroids. There will be three visits to Earth to get speed through gravity assist, two before and one after. One tiny world will be found in the "main belt", which is the area of asteroids located between Mars and Jupiter. The seven other planets are Trojans. Notably, four out of seven Trojans are paired together, which allows Lucy to simultaneously view two asteroids with each visit.
The mission will target several types of asteroid bodies: C-type (chondrite, common old asteroids made from clay and silicate), D–type (asteroids that have low reflectivity or albedos which could be richer in organic molecules), and P-type. We don't yet have any samples on Earth that can confirm this.
Artist's rendition of NASA's Lucy spacecraft passing by a Trojan Asteroid. Southwest Research Institute. Image credit.
Lucy's planned targets for asteroid strikes are: 52246 Donaldjohanson; 3547 Eurybates with its small satellite Queta; 15094 Polymele; 11351 Leucus; 21900 Orus; and the binary 617 Patroclus/Menoetius. Lucy's website provides more information about each asteroid's size, orbit and type.
NASA officials stated in the mission description that the dark-red Trojans of the P- and D type types resemble the ones found in the Kuiper Belt, which is a collection of icy bodies beyond Neptune's orbit. The C-types can be found in the outer regions of the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Trojans all have high levels of dark carbon compounds. They are likely to be rich in water and other volatile compounds, even though they are covered by an insulating dust blanket.
There will be many instruments flying on Lucy: A color visible imager for composition determination; a long range reconnaissance imager to capture high-resolution images each asteroid's surface; thermal emission spectrometers to study how Trojans retain heat; a terminal tracking camera to acquire wide-field images of asteroids to better understand their shapes; and an antenna with high gain to determine each world's mass.
Comets and asteroids are small leftovers from the time our solar system was formed, approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Cosmologists can learn more about the origins of our neighborhood by studying their orbits, makeup, and other dynamics.
Lucy will also continue to build on several recent asteroids missions, including NASA's OSIRIS REx mission. This mission is currently heading for Earth with samples from asteroid Bennu. Japan's Hayabusa2 returned to Earth in 2020 with dust from Ryugu. These objects are near-Earth asteroids. Scientists might be able to compare Lucy's observations of Trojans with this type of space rock in order to better understand the solar system.
