[slate]
[slate] So Lucy is going to survey eight
asteroids over a 12-year mission life.
The first asteroid is in the main belt asteroids - it's Donald Johanson.
xxx. And then the remaining asteroids are the
ones we call the Trojans. And because we believe that they are
remnants of our solar system, by studying their
geology as well as their composition
and their mass, then that will give us insight into
planets, planet formation and in particular the outer planets.
[slate]
The Trojan asteroids are asteroids that
lead and trail Jupiter. And
they are believed to be pristine remnants of our solar system
formation.
[slate]
Well you can see by my shirt that
this is actually the Lucy logo, it looks like a diamond.
And the Lucy spacecraft was named after the Lucy
fossil. Because we will be studying asteroids which are the fossils of
planet formation. But the Lucy spacecraft
and the Lucy fossil was named by archeologist Donald Johanson
and his team, because apparently when they discovered the hominid
they were listening to the Beatles song “Lucy in the sky with diamonds.”
Now we do have a diamond. It’s our beam-
splitter which is on the L’TES instrument which is used
to split the beam. It is actually made of diamonds
[slate]
The Lucy spacecraft will travel four billion miles over its mission.
And it is a very
sophisticated, well-orchestrated trajectory that gets us
there. So when we launch this Saturday at
the opening of our launch period, we’re going to orbit the Earth
for about a year. And then we’re doing to do
an Earth gravity assist and what that does, is that pumps up
our energy and our trajectory. And then we
come back and we do another Earth gravity assist about two-years later.
And by doing that assist it allows us to enter into
the L-4 swarm which is the first
set of asteroids that we do. We encounter those and then we
come back again and loop around the Earth. We do another Earth gravity assist
again. And you can think of that as the Earth being a slingshot.
And then it slings us out and then we encounter the
last set of our Trojan asteroids. [slate]
[slate]
You can find information about Lucy
by going to the NASA website.
Lucy also has a Facebook page
as well as Twitter. There’s a lot
of activities that Southwest
Institute, Research Institute who is the PI institution
has available online, as well as NASA. You can
follow it. You can watch the launch online,
And then you can also participate virtually as well.