At 5:34 am EDT, the Lucy mission launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop an United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket on Oct. 16. After about an hour in flight, it beamed its first transmission to the Deep Space Network, confirming its telemetry was functioning. It is currently traveling at about 67,000 mph, and is on a trajectory that will orbit the Sun and bring it back toward Earth in October 2022 for a gravity assist.
Its twelve-year mission is to fly by one main-belt asteroid and seven Trojan asteroids, making it the agency’s first single spacecraft mission in history to explore so many different asteroids. The so-called Trojan asteroids are a clump of asteroids that orbit with Jupiter around the Sun, while they are concentrated into “swarms” on two LaGrange points around Jupiter, L4 and L5 — about 60° ahead of and behind Jupiter. “Trojan asteroids” refer specifically to the tiny asteroids around Jupiter; “trojans” in general refer to similar small asteroids orbiting a planet, such as Mars.
Lucy is expected to arrive at its first target in 2027, and then will continue with two more gravity-assists from Earth (swinging in a very wide orbit from Jupiter), and visit other asteroids in 2027 and 2033.
