NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is now in Florida – its final Earth-bound destination – before embarking on a mission to study the Jupiter Trojan asteroids.
A United States Air Force C-17 cargo plane from Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina, flew to Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, Colorado, to pick up the spacecraft. The aircraft, with Lucy safely inside, then touched down at the Launch and Landing Facility runway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on July 30, 2021. From there, the spacecraft was transported to an Astrotech Space Operations processing facility in nearby Titusville to undergo final preparations before liftoff.
Named after a fossilized human ancestor whose skeleton provided discoverers insight into humanity’s evolution, the Lucy mission will do much of the same, providing scientists and researchers a look into the origins of our solar system.
The Trojan asteroids orbit the Sun in two groups: one group lies ahead of Jupiter while the other trails behind. Stabilized by both the Sun and Jupiter, those swarms of asteroids are thought to be remnants of the initial material that formed the planets within the solar system. Throughout the duration of the mission, Lucy will visit eight different asteroids over the span of 12 years, unlocking new information about the primitive bodies that created our early solar system.
Lucy is scheduled to launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Oct. 16. The launch is being managed by the NASA’s Launch Services Program based at Kennedy, America’s multi-user spaceport. The mission will be the first to study the Trojans.
