The US space agency Nasa on October 16, 2021 launched Lucy spacecraft, the first space mission to study the Jupiter Trojans Asteroids.
- The spacecraft was launched by an Atlas-V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, US.
- Lucy will journey for 12 years, observing one main belt asteroid and seven Trojan asteroids.
- The Lucy spacecraft has been named after a famous human fossil from Africa nicknamed Lucy, which taught us much about where our species came from.
- The swarms of Trojan asteroids associated with Jupiter are thought to be remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets. These primitive bodies hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system.
- The Jupiter Trojan asteroids are leftover raw materials from the formation of our Solar System’s giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) over 4 .5 billion years ago .
- They hold a record of the composition and physical conditions in the protoplanetary disk from which all the Sun’s planets, including Earth, formed.
- At some time in the distant past, the Trojan asteroids became trapped in their current locations, orbiting the Sun approximately at the distance of Jupiter in two broad swarms associated with the L4 and L5 Lagrange points.
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