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NASA launched a spacecraft named Lucy on Saturday on a 12-year mission to explore Jupiter’s Trojan asteroid for the first time and gather new insights into the formation of the solar system.
The Atlas V rocket responsible for propelling the probe took off from Cape Canaveral at 5:34 a.m. local time (0934 GMT).
Named after the ancient fossils of human ancestors, Lucy will become the first solar-powered spacecraft far away from the sun and will observe more asteroids than any previous probe—eight in total.
Lucy will also make three Earth flights to assist gravity, making it the first spacecraft to return from the outer solar system to the vicinity of the Earth.
“Each of these asteroids, every original sample, provides part of the solar system’s story, our story,” Thomas Zubchin, NASA’s deputy director of science missions, told reporters on the phone.
Lucy’s first encounter will take place in 2025 with Donaldjohanson, the main belt asteroid between Mars and Jupiter. This asteroid is named after the discoverer of Lucy’s fossil.
Between 2027 and 2033, it will encounter seven Trojan asteroids-five in the group guiding Jupiter and two in the group trailing the gas giant.
The largest of these is about 60 miles (95 kilometers) in diameter.
Lucy will fly over a target object within 250 miles (400 kilometers) of its surface and use its onboard instruments and large antennas to investigate its geology, including composition, mass, density, and volume.
The number of Jupiter Trojan asteroids is thought to exceed 7,000, and they are the remaining raw material for the formation of our solar system’s giant planets-Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
Scientists believe that they have important clues about the composition and physical conditions of the protoplanetary disk. All solar planets, including the earth, are formed from the protoplanetary disk.
They are roughly divided into two groups-the leading group is one-sixth of a circle ahead of Jupiter, and the lagging group is one-sixth behind.
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“When we started to study Trojan horses from the ground, one of the really surprising things was how different they were from each other, especially their colors,” said Harlevison, the lead scientist on the mission.
Some are gray, while others are red-these differences indicate how far from the sun they may have formed before assuming their current trajectory.
The Lucy fossil was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974 and helped shed light on human evolution. The name of the space mission was chosen in the hope that it will shed light on the evolution of the solar system.
Paleoanthropologists who discovered the remains of ancient humans named her after the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Diamond Sky”, which they played loudly at the expedition camp.
The Lucy probe flew to the sky with a diamond beam splitter, the Lucy Thermal Emission Spectrometer, which detects far-infrared radiation and maps the surface temperature of asteroids.
By measuring the temperature at different times of the day, the team can infer physical properties, such as how much dust, sand or rocks are present.
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