NASA’s asteroid probe ‘Lucy’, which will explore a total of eight asteroids in Jupiter’s orbit, has embarked on a 12-year journey.
According to Yonhap News, NASA announced that the Lucy was carried into space on the Atlas 5 rocket from the 41st Space Launch Station at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida at around 6:34 pm on the same day.
After carrying out its first mission by passing close to an asteroid in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in April 2025, the Lucy mission was the first in August 2027 to explore 7 Trojan asteroids orbiting the same orbit as Jupiter for the first time. will do
The expedition, which cost about 981 million dollars (about 1.61 trillion won), will come to Earth three times in the process of flying to the target asteroid and perform a gravity-assisted flight that uses the Earth’s gravity to accelerate. If the mission is successful in the 6.3 billion km long expedition, it will be the first spacecraft to return to the vicinity of Earth from outside the solar system.
There are about 10,000 Trojan asteroids to be explored by Lucy, and the Sun and Jupiter form an equilateral triangle and are caught at the Lagrange points (L4, L5) where gravity becomes zero and orbits in front of and behind Jupiter. These asteroids are presumed to be leftovers from the formation of exoplanets such as Jupiter and Saturn, and are estimated to be in a primitive state that has hardly changed over the past 4.5 billion years.
Lucy approaches these asteroids to about 400 km and flies at a speed of 5 to 9 km per second, and uses telemetry equipment to obtain data on the asteroid’s constituent materials, mass, density, and size. Considering this, Lucy’s mission period is 12 years in total, but it is said that the actual time to explore the asteroid is only 24 hours.
The first asteroid to be explored was Donald Johanson. It was selected as the target of exploration because it was close to the flight path to find the Trojan asteroid. It is estimated that it split from a larger asteroid about 100 to 200 million years ago, making it worth exploring on its own.
The exploration of the Trojan asteroid begins with ‘Eurybates’ of the L4 group orbiting the Sun ahead of Jupiter. Euribates, together with ‘Orus’, form the core of this asteroid exploration.
The two asteroids are about 64 km wide, have similar dimensions and orbit the same, but have completely different surface colors. Euribates is gray in color and rich in carbon, but Orus is red in color, so it is presumed that there are many organic substances. Euribates has a moon (moon) of about 1 km in size called ‘Queta’.
After Euribates and Cueta, the Lucy probed L4 region asteroids such as ‘Polymele’, ‘Leucus’, and Orus, and then again flew with the help of Earth’s gravity, before returning in the early 2030s. Move to L5 group. Around 2033, the expedition will end with the exploration of ‘Patroclus’ and ‘Menoetius’, which orbit each other with almost the same size and mass.
NASA expects this will provide new insights into the formation of our solar system, as well as organic matter and life on Earth.
“I think the only thing we can be sure of is that it’s going to be a surprise,” said Phil Christensen, a professor at Arizona State University, who is the lead researcher for the Lucy program.
(Photo=NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab/Yonhap News)
