NASA to launch first space probe to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids By Reuters

(Reuters) – NASA is about on Saturday to launch a first-of-its sort mission, dubbed Lucy, to check Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, two giant clusters of area rocks that scientists imagine are remnants of primordial materials that fashioned the photo voltaic system’s outer planets.

The area probe, packed inside a particular cargo capsule, is due for liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Drive Station in Florida at 5:34 a.m. EDT (0934 GMT), carried aloft by an Atlas (NYSE:) V rocket from United Launch Alliance (UAL), a three way partnership of Boeing (NYSE:) Co and Lockheed Martin Corp (NYSE:).

If all goes in keeping with plan, Lucy will likely be hurled into area on a 12-year expedition to check a file variety of asteroids. Will probably be the primary to discover the Trojans, 1000’s of rocky objects orbiting the solar in two swarms – one forward of the trail of large fuel planet Jupiter and one behind it.

The biggest identified Trojan asteroids, named for the soldiers of Greek mythology, are believed to measure as a lot as 225 kilometers (140 miles) in diameter.

Scientists hope Lucy’s close-up fly-by of seven Trojans will yield new clues to how the photo voltaic system’s planets got here to be fashioned some 4.5 billion years in the past and what formed their current configuration.

Believed to be wealthy in carbon compounds, the asteroids could even present new insights into the origin of natural supplies and life on Earth, NASA stated.

“The Trojan asteroids are leftovers from the early days of our photo voltaic system, successfully the fossils of planet formation,” principal mission investigator Harold Levison of the Southwest Analysis Institute in Boulder, Colorado, was quoted by NASA as saying.

No different single science mission has been designed to go to as many various objects independently orbiting the solar within the historical past of area exploration, NASA stated.

In addition to the Trojans, Lucy will do a fly-by of an asteroid within the photo voltaic system’s fundamental asteroid belt, referred to as DonaldJohanson in honor of the lead discoverer of the fossilized human ancestor generally known as Lucy, from which the NASA mission takes its identify. The Lucy fossil, unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974, was in flip named for the Beatles hit “Lucy within the Sky with Diamonds.”

Lucy the asteroid probe will make spaceflight historical past in one other manner. Following a route that circles again to Earth 3 times for gravitational assists, it is going to be the primary spacecraft ever to return to Earth’s neighborhood from the outer photo voltaic system, in keeping with NASA.

The probe will use rocket thrusters to maneuver in area and two rounded photo voltaic arrays, every the width of a faculty bus, to recharge batteries that may energy the devices contained within the a lot smaller central physique of the spacecraft.