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The Lucy Mission is going to
fly past seven asteroids in

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twelve years with one
spacecraft. We are going to an

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amazing variety of objects with
this mission, and it’s really

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almost pure luck that allowed us
to get as many rich targets as

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we are. Literally, the planets
were aligning to allow us to do

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this mission. The Lucy Mission
is named after the Lucy fossil,

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the Australopithecus fossil,
that was discovered in the 1970s

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in Ethiopia. And just like the
Lucy fossil transformed our

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understanding of hominid
evolution, the Lucy Mission will

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transform our understanding of
Solar System evolution. Trojan

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Asteroids are an interesting
population of small bodies that

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are left over from the formation
of the planets. And they lead or

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follow Jupiter in its orbit by
roughly sixty degrees. If you

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just look at the gravitational
attraction of the Sun and

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Jupiter and put something
exactly sixty degrees in front

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of Jupiter, it’s stable forever.
So, as a result these objects

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are really the leftovers of
planet formation. The stuff that

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went into growing Jupiter and
Saturn are now trapped in these

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locations. The very first
asteroid we get to is a main

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belt asteroid named
DonaldJohanson. We named that

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asteroid in honor of the
researcher who found the Lucy

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fossil. We’re going to use that
asteroid to do a rehearsal on

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our spacecraft to make sure that
everything is working properly

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so that when we get to the
Trojan asteroids, we’re ready to

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go. We’re visiting both of the
Trojan swarms. In the first

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orbit, we’re going into the
leading swarm and we’re going to

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encounter four Trojan targets:
Eurybates, Polymele, Leucus, and

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Orus. And from this, we’re going
to sample the diversity in

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sizes, colors, and compositions.
The first two flybys happen just

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about thirty days apart, so it’s
going to be a pretty busy

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kickoff to the season of
exploring the asteroids in the

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L4 swarm. And then, we’ll fly
past Earth again and out to the

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L5 swarm. The final object we’re
visiting, which I must admit is

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my favorite, is a binary object.
So, that’s two Trojans that

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orbit a common center of mass,
it’s called Patroclus and

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Menoetius. These objects are
nearly identical in size that

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orbit one another. From the Lucy
Mission we’re going to study the

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diversity of our targets because
that tells us something about

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their origin and where they came
from. The interesting thing

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about small bodies in general is
that they are the leftovers of

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planet formation. If you look at
the eight planets that we know

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about, for example, they are
highly processed because of

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internal processing. These
asteroids are objects that

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really haven’t changed much from
when the planets assembled

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themselves. As a result, by
studying them we can figure out

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the physical conditions of the
early Solar System as well as

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how the planets grew and how
they moved around early on. All

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of that will help us form a
detailed picture of what these

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objects really look like because
right now our best images are

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just a point of light. Even
using the Hubble Space Telescope

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or adaptive optics on large,
ground-based telescopes, we

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can’t see surface details. And
it’s going to take the Lucy

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Mission to go to these targets
and see what they’re really made

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of and what they look like.