NASA will send its first spacecraft to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids to glean new insights into the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago.
- The probe, called Lucy after an ancient fossil, discovered in Ethiopia in 1974m, that provided insights into the evolution of human species, will launch on October 16 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
- The Lucy mission is to investigate the group of rocky bodies circling the Sun in two swarms, one preceding Jupiter in its orbital path and the other trailing behind it.
- The mission will fly by its target objects within 250 miles (400 kilometers) of their surfaces, and use its onboard instruments and large antenna to investigate their geology.
- It will be the first solar-powered to venture this far from the Sun, and will observe more asteroids than any other spacecraft before it.
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