NASA announces two new missions to study the early solar system
Right behind yesterday’s Explorer mission announcement, NASA has just announced two new Discovery missions to study the very early history of our solar system — the period about 10 million years after the hydrogen and helium in the sun burst into life. Known as Lucy and Psyche, the two missions will peer back in time by analyzing several metallic asteroids floating in the main asteroid belt and further out in Jupiter’s orbit.
Lucy is a robotic spacecraft that will continue the success of NASA’s New Horizons mission (currently on its way to photograph the Kuiper Belt) when it launches in October 2021. The Lucy spacecraft is expected to reach the main asteroid in 2025 and will spent the next few years studying six different Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which circle the sun in two different clusters that share Jupiter’s orbit. “Because the Trojans are remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets,” Lucy mission principal investigator Harold F. Levison explained, they hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system.”
Lucy will be carrying updated versions of the RALPH and LORRI science instruments onboard New Horizons and will also be borrowing some team members from asteroid-bound OSIRIS-Rex mission that launched in late 2016.
Right behind yesterday’s Explorer mission announcement, NASA has just announced two new Discovery missions to study the very early history of our solar system — the period about 10 million years after the hydrogen and helium in the sun burst into life. Known as Lucy and Psyche, the two missions will peer back in time by analyzing several metallic asteroids floating in the main asteroid belt and further out in Jupiter’s orbit.
Lucy is a robotic spacecraft that will continue the success of NASA’s New Horizons mission (currently on its way to photograph the Kuiper Belt) when it launches in October 2021. The Lucy spacecraft is expected to reach the main asteroid in 2025 and will spent the next few years studying six different Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which circle the sun in two different clusters that share Jupiter’s orbit. “Because the Trojans are remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets,” Lucy mission principal investigator Harold F. Levison explained, they hold vital clues to deciphering the history of the solar system.”
Lucy will be carrying updated versions of the RALPH and LORRI science instruments onboard New Horizons and will also be borrowing some team members from asteroid-bound OSIRIS-Rex mission that launched in late 2016.
