Powered by the sun, Lucy space probe to zip past Trojan asteroids, collecting clues to universe’s origin

The Jovian Trojans lap the sun in the same orbit as Jupiter in this artistic illustration of information collected by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Explorer, or WISE.
Data show that the asteroids are uniformly dark with a hint of burgundy color, and have matte surfaces that reflect little sunlight. 
(Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The Jovian Trojans lap the sun in the same orbit as Jupiter in this artistic illustration of information collected by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Explorer, or WISE. Data show that the asteroids are uniformly dark with a hint of burgundy color, and have matte surfaces that reflect little sunlight. (Photo courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The probe that NASA launched Oct. 16 is not headed to Jupiter. It is headed toward clusters of asteroids along Jupiter's orbital path.

They are known as the Trojan swarms, and they represent the final unexplored regions of asteroids in the solar system.

The spacecraft, a deep-space robotic archaeologist named Lucy, will seek to answer pressing questions about the origins of the solar system, how the planets migrated to their current orbits and how life might have emerged on Earth.

After the probe separated from its rocket, the spacecraft deployed both of its solar arrays, but one didn't open fully. In a statement Tuesday, Oct. 19, NASA senior science communications officer Karen Fox reported that the problem had delayed progress but did not imperil the mission. The Lucy mission blog is at blogs.nasa.gov/lucy.

In the days before the launch, NASA administrators explained why the mission is significant.

"We have never gone this far to study asteroids," said Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA. "In so doing, we're going to be able to better understand the formation of the solar system, and better understand ourselves and our development."

After a six-year cruise, Lucy will fly close to seven Trojan asteroids through 2033, completing wild circuits of the sun that conjure the outline of a Formula 1 racetrack in some graphic renderings.

The spacecraft will study the geology, composition, density and structure of the Trojans, which are small bodies locked in stable points along Jupiter's orbit of the sun, fixed in their own orbits ahead or behind the massive planet.

"It's always interesting to go somewhere for the first time," said Cathy Olkin, the deputy principal investigator of the Lucy mission. "Every time we've done that, we've learned more and more about our solar system and the area in space that we live in."

[RELATED: Lucy's first target not one of the Trojans]

Humanity has explored a variety of small rocky bodies throughout the solar system. The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission landed on Eros in the inner asteroid belt. The Dawn mission orbited Ceres and Vesta, the two largest worlds in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. Japan's Hayabusa missions and NASA's OSIRIS-REx — the "Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer" — completed close encounters with near-Earth asteroids. And the New Horizons mission visited Arrokoth, an object in the solar system's distant Kuiper belt.

But the Trojans in Jupiter's vicinity have yet to be investigated. About 10,000 such objects have been discovered. When the first was spotted more than a century ago, astronomers began naming them after heroes of Homer's Iliad. The result was the overall descriptor "Trojan."

The mission name "Lucy" is a nod to the 3.2 million-year-old australopithecine skeleton discovered in 1974, which revealed secrets of human evolution. The NASA team hopes that the robotic Lucy does the same for the solar system's evolution, and prehistory is a recurring theme among the mission's scientists.

Tom Statler, the Lucy program scientist at NASA, describes Lucy as "planetary archaeology."

NICE MODEL

The mission was born of necessity.

Thirty years ago, the concept of planetary formation was much more orderly than it is today: A star formed in the center of a rotating disc of protoplanetary material. Gradually, the material condensed and collected into eight planets in simple orbits (as well as Pluto).

However, when planetary scientist Hal Levison and fellow theorists tried to simulate the formation of the solar system, they repeatedly ran into a problem: It was virtually impossible to build Uranus and Neptune in their present orbits. To account for those worlds, known as the ice giants, Levison and three other researchers developed the Nice model of solar system evolution (named for the city in France).

The model suggests that the giant planets formed much closer to the sun than their current orbits, and that the increasingly eccentric orbits of a young Jupiter and Saturn destabilized and rearranged the solar system. In the process, as the giant planets moved, and Uranus and Neptune bounded outward, they scattered the small bodies of the solar system. Some comets and asteroids were flung to the deep outer solar system, and others were ejected entirely out into the Milky Way.

A small minority of scattered asteroids were ensnared in two of Jupiter's permanent Lagrange points, which are regions of space where the gravitational and orbital influences of the planet and the sun are balanced. The regions both lead and follow Jupiter in its orbit. Those asteroids are the Trojan swarms.

Today, the Nice model offers the predominant understanding of how a disc of dust and gas about 4.6 billion years ago became a system of planets circling a sun. Moreover, telescope observations of exoplanets prompted a broader scientific reevaluation of how star systems, including our own, can form. Some distant stars are orbited by giant planets that are closer to them than Mercury is to our sun.

TARGETING THE TROJANS

Now the principal investigator of the Lucy mission, Levison came to believe that the planetary science community's ideas about planetary formation outpaced the data it had available. The best way to constrain variables in the Nice model would be to account for the origins of the Trojans.

"One of the surprising things about the Trojan population is that they are physically very different from one another but occupy a really small region of space," he said. "That diversity in that small region is telling us something important about the early evolution of the solar system."

To understand the secrets locked in the Trojans' orbits, Levison needed to persuade NASA to build a spacecraft to study them and determine what formed where. Lucy is the result. It was chosen for flight in 2014 through NASA's Discovery Program, in which scientists compete over smaller mission proposals.

COUNTING CRATERS

Studying camera imagery will be an important part of the Lucy team's scientific efforts.

By counting the number of craters spotted on each asteroid, an object's surface age is revealed. (Older surfaces will have been hit by more impactors and thus show more craters.) The scientists will also analyze the returned images for the distribution of color across the asteroids' surfaces, which can be an indicator of what the rocks are made of. Thermal measurements will help identify the compositions and structures of the asteroids.

Researchers will also use infrared spectra to measure the presence of minerals, ices and organic molecules.

NASA is interested in finding primordial organic material on asteroids because billions of years ago, they may have seeded Earth with the chemical ingredients necessary for life.

12-YEAR MISSION

Despite the Trojans sharing an orbit with Jupiter, Lucy will not visit Jupiter. Before the spacecraft even left Earth, it was closer to Jupiter than it will be when it visits the Trojans.

During its 12-year mission it will be powered by two giant solar arrays that are stowed at launch and gradually expand outward like folding fans. Lucy's roller coaster-like trajectory will carry it farther than any solar-powered spacecraft has ever flown. And it will be moving at about 6 miles per second at its fastest clip.

"Its speed will be like running a 10K every second," Olkin said.

The spacecraft will be in a sophisticated orbit of loop the loops across the solar system, circling the sun, borrowing gravity from Earth for free propulsion to Jupiter's orbital path at a point known as Lagrange 4. Gravity will take it back around the sun to the Earth, whose gravity will again hurl it outward, this time to Lagrange 5, and back, the process repeating. The trajectory is driven by the positions of planets and gravity assists, meaning the spacecraft, if nothing stops it, will continue to do this for hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of years.

Each encounter will be at an altitude of 600 miles or less from the Trojan's surface. After the final flyby, depending on Lucy's health, NASA can target future asteroids and other celestial objects for analyses.

"As we are flying past a Trojan asteroid, we are taking data," Olkin said.

Even if the mission ends in the 2030s, there could be another act: Lucy will still be soaring through Jovian Lagrange points and swinging back around Earth, there and back, there and back. As such, the agency has equipped Lucy with a "time capsule" of poetry, quotes and song lyrics, in the hope that future space-faring humans may one day recover the spacecraft and share with our descendants a hint of what life must have been like in the prehistoric ages of the 21st century.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the ucy spacecraft lifts off from Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Saturday, Oct. 16, 2021, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Lucy will observe Trojan asteroids, a unique family of asteroids that orbit the sun in front of and behind Jupiter.   (AP Photo/John Raoux)
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the ucy spacecraft lifts off from Launch Complex 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Saturday, Oct. 16, 2021, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Lucy will observe Trojan asteroids, a unique family of asteroids that orbit the sun in front of and behind Jupiter. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

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