‘Lucy’ spacecraft will visit a record eight asteroids
Attention asteroid aficionados: NASA is set to launch a series of spacecraft to visit and even bash some of the solar system’s most enticing space rocks.
The robotic trailblazer named Lucy is up first, blasting off this weekend on a 12-year cruise to swarms of asteroids out near Jupiter — unexplored time capsules from the dawn of the solar system. And yes, there will be diamonds in the sky with Lucy, on one of its science instruments, as well as lyrics from other Beatles’ songs. NASA is targeting the predawn hours of Saturday for liftoff.
Barely a month later, an impactor spacecraft named Dart, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, will give chase to a doubleasteroid closer to home. The mission will end with Dart ramming the main asteroid’s moonlet to change its orbit, a test that could one day save Earth from an incoming rock.
Next summer, a spacecraft will launch to a rare metal world — an nickel and iron asteroid that might be the exposed core of a once-upon-a-time planet. A pair of smaller companion craft — the size of suitcases — will peel away to another set of double asteroids.
And in 2023, a space capsule will parachute into the Utah desert with NASA’s first samples of an asteroid, collected last year by the excavating robot Osiris-Rex. The samples are from Bennu, a rubble and boulder-strewn rock that could endanger Earth a couple centuries from now.
“Each one of those astefossilized
roids we’re visiting tells our story … the story of us, the story of the solar system,” said NASA’s chief of science missions, Thomas Zurbuchen.
There’s nothing better for understanding how our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago, said Lucy’s principal scientist, Hal Levison of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “They’re the fossils of planet formation.”
The asteroid-smacking Dart spacecraft — set to launch Nov. 24 — promises to be a dramatic exercise in planetary defense. If all goes well, the high-speed smashup will occur next fall just 7 million miles away, within full view of ground telescopes.
The much longer $981 million Lucy mission — the first to Jupiter’s so-called Trojan entourage — is targeting an unprecedented eight asteroids.
Lucy intends to pass within 600 miles of each targeted asteroid.
Lucy is named after the
remains of an early human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia in 1974; the 3.2 million-yearold female got her name from the 1967 Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
“The Lucy fossil really transformed our understanding of human evolution, and that’s what we want to do is transform our understanding of solar system evolution by looking at all these different objects,” said Southwest Research Institute’s Cathy Olkin, the deputy principal scientist who proposed the spacecraft’s name.
One of its science instruments actually has a disc of lab-grown diamond totaling 6.7 carats.
And there’s another connection to the Fab
Four, a plaque attached to the spacecraft includes lines from songs they wrote, along with quotes from other luminaries. From a John Lennon single: ‘‘We all shine on ... like the moon and the stars and the sun.’’