PhotoLaunched in Cape Canaveral Lucy, NASA’s $ 981 million mission to explore the almost unknown asteroid family will tell a lot about the origin of the solar system.
Once launched, Lucy will make a 12-year journey into space with the Atlas-5 rocket, a key belt asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, and then to seven mysterious ‘Trojan’ asteroids. Orbit near Jupiter – the actual record for a single space probe
The work derives its name from the fossil of Lucy, the most famous ancestor of man, whose skeleton has provided valuable information about the evolution of our organisms. Similarly, NASA’s study seeks to revolutionize our knowledge of the formation of planets in the solar system by first visiting the so-called Trojan meteorites: Jupiter and Jupiter in the letter of the two points of equilibrium ‘cosmic stones’ (called ‘Lagrangians’) that share the orbit with Jupiter. Balances each other and cancels each other out.
So far, more than 7,000 Trojan asteroids have been identified, all of which are very different from each other: some are more red, others more gray, probably due to their different chemical composition. Lucy will try to analyze it with his on-board instruments and try to capture images of their surface: not an easy task, considering that the meteorite will fly over the asteroids at a speed of 5-9 kilometers.
Reproduction © Copyright ANSA
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