Washington:
NASA is poised to send its 1st spacecraft to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids to glean new insights into the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago, the space agency mentioned Tuesday.
The probe, known as Lucy immediately after an ancient fossil that supplied insights into the evolution of human species, will launch on October 16 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Its mission is to investigate the group of rocky bodies circling the Sun in two swarms, one preceding Jupiter in its orbital path and the other trailing behind it.
After getting boosts from Earth’s gravity, Lucy will embark on a 12-year journey to eight diverse asteroids – one in the Main Belt amongst Mars and Jupiter and then seven Trojans.
“Despite the fact that they really are in a very small region of space, they’re very physically different from one another,” Hal Levison, the mission’s principal scientist told reporters, about the Trojan asteroids, which quantity more than 7,000 in total.
“For example, they have very different colors, some are grey, some are red,” he added, with the variations indicating how far away from the Sun they could have formed prior to assuming their present trajectory.
“Whatever Lucy finds will give us vital clues about the formation of our solar system,” added Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division.
Lucy will fly by its target objects inside 250 miles (400 kilometers) of their surfaces, and use its onboard instruments and huge antenna to investigate their geology, such as composition, mass, density and volume.
The ship was constructed by Lockheed Martin and involves more than two miles of wire and solar panels that, placed finish-to-finish, would be as tall as a 5-story creating.
It will be the 1st solar-powered to venture this far from the Sun, and will observe more asteroids than any other spacecraft prior to it. The total mission expense is $981 million.
The researchers who found Lucy the fossil in Ethiopia in 1974 named her immediately after the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” which they had been playing loudly at the expedition camp.
In a nod to this heritage, the official logo of the NASA mission is diamond shaped.
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