Lucy (spacecraft)
Artists' impression of the Lucy spacecraft performing a flyby of a Jupiter trojan
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| Mission type | Multiple-flyby mission |
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| Operator | NASA · SwRI |
| Mission duration | Planned: 12 years |
| Start of mission | |
| Launch date | 2021 (planned) |
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Official insignia for the Lucy mission
Lucy is a planned NASA space probe that will tour five Jupiter trojans, asteroids which share Jupiter's orbit around the Sun, orbiting either ahead of or behind the planet.
On 4 January 2017, Lucy was chosen, along with the Psyche mission, as NASA's Discovery Program missions 13 and 14 respectively.
The mission is named after the 'Lucy' hominin skeleton, because the study of Trojans could reveal the "fossils of planet formation": materials that clumped together in the early history of the Solar System to form planets and other bodies. The Australopithecus itself was named for a Beatles song, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".
Lucy will launch in 2021 and will arrive at the L4 Trojan cloud (a group of asteroids that orbits about 60° ahead of Jupiter) in 2027, where it will fly by four Trojans, 3548 Eurybates, 15094 Polymele, 11351 Leucus, and 21900 Orus. After these flybys, Lucy will return to the vicinity of the Earth whereupon it will receive a gravity assist to take it to the L5 Trojan cloud (which trails about 60° behind Jupiter), where it will visit the binary Trojan 617 Patroclus with its satellite Menoetius. Lucy will also fly by the inner main-belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, which was named for the discoverer of the Lucy hominin fossil in 2015.
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