NASA’s Lucy mission launched early Saturday from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla.
The first-ever mission to the Trojan Asteroids , Lucy …
NASA’s Lucy mission launched early Saturday from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Fla. The first-ever mission to the Trojan Asteroids, Lucy will travel some 4 billion miles and lifted off aboard the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. Lucy’s prime mission is nearly 12 years long, during which it will visit eight asteroids – a Main Belt asteroid and seven Trojans – that have been sharing an orbit with Jupiter at the planet’s Lagrange points as it goes around the sun for billions of years. Lagrange points are places around a planet’s orbit where the gravitational pull of the planet and the sun and the motion of the orbit combine to create an equilibrium. The asteroids are thought to be remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets and scientists say that studying them will give them important clues about the formation of the Solar System. No other space mission in history has been launched to as many different destinations in independent orbits around the sun, NASA notes. Lucy – traveling at an average cruising speed of 39,000 mph and 15,000 mph as it flies by each asteroid – will also be the first spacecraft to journey a bit farther than the distance of Jupiter and return to the vicinity of the Earth for a final gravity assist that will send it back out to its final Trojan encounters.
