I'm the project scientist on The Lucy Mission and we have benefited greatly from Hubble.
Lucy launched on October 16 2021. "Liftoff Atlas 5 takes flight sending Lucy to uncover the fossils
of our solar system." It's an 11 and a half year Mission because we are going relatively far from
the earth we're visiting both the leading and trailing group of the Trojan asteroids they've
never been explored before with a spacecraft they are in the same orbit around the Sun as
Jupiter but they're trailing Jupiter or leading it by about 60 degrees so they stay almost the
same distance from Jupiter as they are from the Sun and they're there because it's sort
of a gravitational fly trap. We began in this intensive surgery Hubble around the Lucy targets
once we knew the Lucy mission was going it's a difficult observation it requires going very
very deep with Hubble and even then it was right at the barely at the edge of what Hubble could do.
We did find the satellite of one of our targets as an asteroid named Euribides
and it has a tiny satellite that we named Queta that was found directly with Hubble.
We took our cue for that search from the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
Hubble did that by finding four satellites two Nix and Hydra were found in 2005 and then the
next couple were found years later when they realized the orbital configuration of Nix and
Hydra looked like there might be more and that really enabled a lot of science because we were
able to plan ahead and make observations with the New Horizons spacecraft when it went by.
Now that we know that there are these satellites around two of the Lucy targets we'll be able
to plan ahead and utilize that knowledge to get images and more information about
those targets when we fly by. What Hubble Is uniquely good at doing is
the kind of observation of these faint distant things that you really can't do any other way.
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