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Journalism of Courage
NASA’s Lucy mission is on an epic 6-billion-kilometre-long journey to study the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, and nearly one and a half years after it launched, it has finally caught a glimpse of the asteroids.
The Lucy spacecraft used its L’LORRI high-resolution camera to capture the first views of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids between March 25 and March 27, said NASA in a statement on Thursday.
Lucy launched on an Atlas V rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on October 26, 2021. About a year into its journey, after travelling around 620,000 kilometres, it captured stunning images of the Earth and the Moon, images that illustrate how far it had already travelled by that point.
But even the latest images are taken at what is just the beginning of its journey. The 12-year mission will take close observations of nine of Jupiter’s Trojans and two main belt asteroids along with that.
It is the first spacecraft sent to study the Trojan asteroids, which orbit the Sun in the same path that the planet Jupiter takes. NASA describes them as an “ancient population of asteroid fossils.” This is because they are believed to be made of the same materials that formed the planets in the solar system when it was created.
The latest images taken by Lucy will help NASA engineers and scientists learn how the Trojan asteroids reflect light from certain angles. In the images, the asteroids are little more than just single points of light against a backdrop of distant stars. But despite this, the data will help the mission team choose exposure times for when the spacecraft inevitably gets close to its targets.
The image of Eurybates was taken over a span of 6.5 hours, while that of Polymele took about 2.5 hours. The spacecraft took a similar 2 hours for Leucus while taking a whole ten hours to image Orus.
Based on current plans, Lucy will get close to these asteroids in 2027 and 2028 as it travels through swarms of small asteroids that travel ahead of Jupiter in the planet’s orbit.
