NASA’s newest missions will explore solar system’s asteroids
NASA wi l l l au n c h t wo new missions to asteroids in search of clues about the early solar system, the space agency announced Wednesday.
The first mission, schedu l e d t o l a u n c h i n 2 02 1 , will send a probe to study the Trojan asteroids that swarm around Jupiter and are thought to be relics of the earliest days of the solar system. The project has been dubbed “Lucy” in honor of the 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus who is humanity’s most famous ancient relative.
The second, slated for 2023, will send an orbiter t o 1 6 P s y c h e , a mas s i v e metallic object in the asteroid belt that is thought to be the exposed iron core of a protoplanet.
The missions are part of NASA’s Discovery Program, launched in 1992 to promote what then-NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin called “better, faster, cheaper” solar system exploration. Discovery projects are shorter, more focused and smaller in scale than the average mission, and their costs are capped at around $500 million.
Mars Pathfinder — which successfully set the first rover to explore Mars — was a Discovery mission. So were MESSENGER, the first (and so far, only) orbital survey of Mercury; Dawn, which is studying the two biggest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres; and the Kepler Space Telescope, which has found thousand of exoplanets orbiting far-off stars, including nearly two dozen in the “habitable zone.”
“We’ve explored terrestrial planets, gas giants, and a range of other bodies orbiting the sun,” Jim Green, NASA’s planetary science director, said in a statement. “Lucy will observe primitive remnants from farther out in the solar system, while Psyche will directly observe the interior of a planetary body. These additional pieces of the puzzle will help us understand how the sun and its family of planets formed, c h a n ge d ove r t i me, a n d became places where life could develop and be sustained — and what the future may hold.”
Psyche and Luc y were selected from a shortlist of five proposals. Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (or DAVINCI) would have sent a probe on a 63-minute journey to the surface of Venus to study the planet’s thick atmosphere. Another Venusian mission, the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy mission (VERITAS), would map the planet’s surface and search for water and signs of geologic activity.
T h e l a s t , N e a r E a r t h O b j e c t C a m e r a , w o u l d have launched an infrared space telescope to seek out potentially hazardous nearEarth asteroids. Though not selected, NEOCam will get an additional year of funding, NASA said, suggesting that the telescope could be built someday.
Both Lucy and Psyche will seek to reveal the secrets of the solar system’s beginnings.