NASA’s next asteroid mission is taking shape

[Mike Wehner]

• NASA is currently preparing for its next asteroid-visiting missing which is set to launch this year.
• The mission, which will see a spacecraft named Lucy perform a flyby of asteroids that are believed to have originated when our solar system was born, is scheduled to launch in October.
• The coronavirus pandemic made preparing for the mission more difficult than it otherwise would have been, but NASA managed to stay on track with its expected launch date.

You've probably noticed that there's been a whole lot of talk about asteroids in the scientific community lately. With missions like Hayabusa2 from Japan's JAXA space agency and NASA's own OSIRIS-REx visiting the space rock Bennu, researchers are excited to learn as much as they can about the rocks that drift through our system.

Never one to sit idly by and wait for one mission to complete before preparing for the next, NASA is rapidly piecing together a spacecraft called Lucy which will embark on a trip to study some truly ancient asteroids. The mission aims to send Lucy on a flyby past a collection of space rocks known as the Trojan asteroids. These are rocks that are believed to be "leftovers" from when the solar system was in its infancy, and they could teach us a lot about the history of our system and how planets like Earth came to be.

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NASA’s next asteroid mission is taking shape originally appeared on BGR.com on Thu, 7 Jan 2021 at 15:29:29 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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