Washington:
NASA launched a spacecraft known as Lucy on a 12-year mission to discover Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids for the 1st time on Saturday, gathering new insights into the solar system’s formation.
The Atlas V rocket accountable for propelling the probe took off at 5:34 am regional time (0934 GMT) from Cape Canaveral.
Named right after an ancient fossil of a pre-human ancestor, Lucy will develop into the 1st solar-powered spacecraft to venture so far from the Sun, and will observe more asteroids than any probe just before it — eight in all.
Lucy will also make 3 Earth flybys for gravity assists, generating it the 1st spacecraft to return to our planet’s vicinity from the outer solar technique.
“Each one of those asteroids, each one of those pristine samples, provide a part of the story of the solar system, the story of us,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission, told reporters on a contact.
Lucy’s 1st encounter will be in 2025 with asteroid Donaldjohanson in the Main Belt, involving Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid is named right after the discoverer of the Lucy fossil.
Between 2027 and 2033, it will encounter seven Trojan asteroids — 5 in the swarm that leads Jupiter, and two in the swarm that trails the gas giant.
The biggest of them is about 60 miles (95 kilometers) in diameter.
Lucy will fly by its target objects inside 250 miles (400 kilometers) of their surfaces, and use its onboard instruments and big antenna to investigate their geology, such as composition, mass, density and volume.
– Diamond in the sky –
The Jupiter Trojan asteroids, believed to quantity nicely more than 7,000, are leftover raw components from the formation of our solar system’s giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Scientists think they hold crucial clues about the composition and physical circumstances in the protoplanetary disk from which all the Sun’s planets, such as Earth, formed.
They are broadly grouped into two swarms — the top swarm is one-sixth a lap ahead of Jupiter when the trailing swarm is one-sixth behind.
“One of the really surprising things about the Trojans, when we started to study them from the ground, is how different they are from one another, particularly with their colors,” stated Hal Levison, the mission’s essential scientist.
Some are gray, when other people are red — with the variations indicating how far away from the Sun they may have formed just before assuming their present trajectory.
Lucy the fossil was found in Ethiopia in 1974 and helped shed light on human evolution. The space mission’s name was selected with the hope that it will shed light on the solar system’s evolution.
The paleoanthropologists who found the hominin remains named her right after the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, which they have been playing loudly at the expedition camp.
Lucy the probe is carrying a diamond beam splitter into the sky — the Lucy Thermal Emission Spectrometer, which detects far infrared radiation, to map asteroid surface temperatures.
By measuring the temperature at distinct instances of day, the group can deduce physical properties such as how a great deal dust, sand or rock is present.
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