[Music throughout]
The Trojan asteroids are small bodies in our Solar System.
They share an orbit with Jupiter.
There's two swarms of them.
One located 60 degrees ahead of Jupiter in its orbit,
and the other swarm is located 60 degrees behind Jupiter in its orbit.
And these Trojan asteroids are remnants from planetary formation.
So sometimes we'll call them the fossils of Solar System formation.
Their near neighbors might have gone into forming the giant planets.
And so these objects then became captured in their locations today.
And so in that way, we can look and see what went
into forming the planets in our Solar System.
The main goal of the Lucy mission is to explore the Trojan asteroids.
We want to understand where these asteroids came from
and why they're so diverse.
And this is going to be our first ever exploration of these objects.
From the Earth, we can see certain features on the Trojan asteroids.
We can see where they're located. We can see their colors.
And we can get spectra.
Spectra can tell you about the surface composition.
A spectrum is when you take light and spread it out
into all its different wavelengths.
And so you have the brightness of the light as a function of wavelength.
So think of it like a rainbow.
But you're going to divide up the colors even more finely
than just ROYGBIV.
From Earth, the Trojan asteroids are just a point of light, and you can't
tell one part of the Trojan asteroid composition versus another part.
And Lucy is going to be able to get that detail close up.
We'll be able to do that by taking this spacecraft
and these instruments to the Trojan asteroids.
And we'll be able to see
how the surface composition varies across the Trojan asteroids.
Additionally, we have really large
solar arrays because we are solar powered spacecraft.
The spacecraft gets its power from the Sun.
At the Trojan asteroids
we're more than five times further from the Sun than Earth is.
So there's much less light.
We need large solar arrays to power our spacecraft.
And in fact, we will be the furthest operating
spacecraft powered by solar arrays during our mission.