NASA’s Lucy mission will soon head to the Trojan asteroids in search of cosmic fossils

Mission type

Multiple flyby

Operator

NASA

Launch date

16 October 2021

Target

Trojan asteroids

Arrival at target

2027

Primary objective

To explore one mainbelt asteroid and seven

Trojan asteroids

Status

In progress

Harold ‘Hal’ Levison

Lucy principal investigator

The Lucy mission is led by principal investigator Harold ‘Hal’ Levison from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He specialises in the formation and long-term behaviour of Solar System bodies, including comets, Kuiper belt objects and the Trojan asteroids.

Lucy is a NASA probe scheduled to launch on 16 October 2021. It will be the first-ever mission to explore a set of asteroids near Jupiter known as the Trojan asteroids. These ancient space rocks hold important clues to the creation of our Solar System and possibly the origin of life on Earth.

Along with a mission called Psyche, Lucy was approved in January 2017 as part of NASA’s Discovery program, which supports focused and relatively cheap planetary missions whose development costs are capped at around $450 million (£328 million). A year after approval, the mission was officially given a schedule and a set of eight asteroid targets. Lucy is named for a famous female Australopithecus afarensis fossil found in Ethiopia that, as a relative of modern humans, helped illuminate the evolution of our species. It’s hoped that the spacecraft will similarly elucidate our Solar System’s earliest days.

Lucy spans more than 14 metres (46 feet) from tip to tip – larger than a four-storey building – though much of that will be the enormous solar panels used to power the spacecraft. The spacecraft will carry an instrument that can measure the surface temperatures of its target asteroids and provide information about their composition, two high-resolution cameras and a device that uses infrared light to inspect and identify ice, organic material and different minerals in each asteroid.