NASA plans to launch a probe in asteroid clusters along Jupiter’s orbit known as the Trojan Swarms, which are the last unexplored regions of asteroids in the solar system, on Saturday, will answer pressing questions about the origins of the solar system, how the planets migrated to their current orbits, and how life on earth could have originated.
We have never gone this far to study asteroids said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. This will allow us to better understand the formation of the solar system and better understand ourselves and our development.
After a six-year cruise, Lucy will fly near seven Trojan asteroids by 2033, completing wild circles of the sun, some of which are reminiscent of the outlines of a Formula 1 racetrack.
The spacecraft will study the geology, composition, density and structure of Trojans, which are small bodies locked in stable points along the orbit of the Jupiter, Sun and in their own orbits in front of or behind the massive planet are fixed.
It is always interesting to go anywhere for the first time said Cathy Olkin, assistant chief investigator for the Lucy Mission. Every time we’ve done this, we’ve learned more about our solar system and the space we live in.
Humanity has explored a multitude of small rock bodies throughout the solar system. The NEAR mission landed on Eros in the inner asteroid belt. The Dawn mission orbited Ceres and Vesta, the two largest worlds in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. The Japanese Hayabusa and NASA OSIRISREX missions resulted in close encounters with near-Earth asteroids, and the New Horizons mission visited Arrokoth, an object in the distant Kuiper Belt of the solar system.
But the Trojans near Jupiter have not yet been investigated. About 10,000 objects of this type have been discovered. When the first was discovered more than a century ago, astronomers began naming it after the heroes of Homer’s Iliad. The result was the general name for “Trojans”.
The mission name “Lucy” is an allusion to the 3.2 million year old australopithecin skeleton, discovered in 1974, which revealed the secrets of human evolution. The NASA team hopes robotics will do the same to Lucy for the evolution of the solar system, and prehistory is a recurring theme among mission scientists.
Tom Statler, the Lucy program scientist at NASA, describes Lucy as “planetary archeology” and compares it to studying the pyramids in Egypt.
If you want to understand how the pyramids were built, you can look at the pyramids from the outside, you can climb them anywhere said Dr. Statler. However, this will answer very little about how they were actually built.
However, if you can find the abandoned construction site next to the pyramids and dig it up, you will find the tools that were used to build them, and you will find the leftover blocks, the things that were broken and shaped but not used, then you start to get an idea of the inside of a pyramid and how it got there, he explained.
We do that with asteroids, he said. We’re digging up the rubble from the construction site.
The mission arose out of necessity.
Thirty years ago the concept of planet formation was much more orderly than it is today: a star that formed in the center of a spinning disk made of protoplanetary material. Gradually, the material condensed and accumulated on eight planets in simple orbits (as well as Pluto).
However, when the planetary scientist Hal Levison and his theoretical colleagues tried to simulate the formation of the solar system, they repeatedly encountered a problem: It was practically impossible to build Uranus and Neptune in their current orbits. Worlds Known As The Ice Giants, Dr. Levison, now principal researcher of the Lucy mission, and three other researchers developed the Nice model of the evolution of the solar system (named after the city of France).
The model suggests that the giant planets formed much closer to the Sun than their current orbits, and that the increasingly eccentric orbits of a young Jupiter and Saturn destabilized and reorganized the solar system. As the giant planets moved and Uranus and Neptune jumped outward, they dispersed the tiny bodies of the solar system. Some comets and asteroids have been hurled into the deep outer solar system, others have been hurled completely into the Milky Way. .
A small minority of scattered asteroids have been trapped in two of Jupiter’s permanent Lagrange points, which are regions of space where the gravitational and orbital influences of the planet and the sun are balanced. The regions drive and follow Jupiter in its orbit. Asteroids are swarms of Trojans.
Today, the Nice model provides the prevalent understanding of how a disk of dust and gas became a planetary system revolving around a sun some 4.6 billion years ago. In addition, observations of exoplanets with telescopes led to a broader scientific re-evaluation of the formation of star systems, including our own. Some distant stars are orbited by giant planets that are closer to them than Mercury is our sun.
Dr. Levison came to believe that the ideas of the planetary scientific community about planet formation exceeded the data at his disposal. The best way to constrain the variables in the Nice model is to explain the origins of the Trojans.
One of the amazing things about the Trojan population is that they are very different from one another physically, but they occupy a really small space, he said. This diversity in this small region tells us something important about the early evolution of the solar system.
To understand the secrets in the orbits of the Trojans, Dr. Levison persuaded NASA to build a spaceship to study it and see what formed where. Lucy is the result. It was selected to fly through NASA’s Discovery program in 2014, in which scientists compete for proposals for smaller missions.
Studying the camera images will be an important part of Lucy’s team’s scientific work. Counting the craters discovered on each asteroid reveals the age of an object’s surface. (Older surfaces are hit by more impactors and therefore show more craters.) The scientists will also analyze the returned images for the color distribution on the asteroid surfaces, which may be an indicator of what the rocks are made of: thermal measurements will help that Identify the composition and structure of the asteroids. You will also use infrared spectra to measure the presence of minerals, ice, and organic molecules.
NASA is interested in finding primordial organic matter in asteroids because they may have sown Earth billions of years ago with the chemical ingredients necessary for life.
Although the Trojans share an orbit with Jupiter, Lucy will not visit Jupiter. Even before the space probe takes off from Earth, it will be closer to Jupiter than when it visits the Trojans.
During its 12-year mission, it is powered by two giant solar panels that are stowed away at launch and gradually expand outward like foldable fans and it will move at about six miles per second at its fastest speed.
Your speed will be like running 10 km per second, said Dr. Olkin.
The spacecraft will be in an elaborate orbit through the solar system, orbiting the sun, and using gravity to propel Jupiter’s orbit freely into a point known as Lagrange 4, the gravity of which will once again propel it outward, this time to Lagrange 5. and back, the process is repeated. The trajectory is aided by the positions of the planets and gravity, which means that if nothing stops the spacecraft, it will do so for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years.
Each encounter occurs at an altitude of 600 miles or less from the Trojan’s surface. After the final flyby, NASA can target future asteroids and other celestial objects for analysis, depending on Lucy’s health.
As we drive past a Trojan asteroid, we are collecting data, said Dr. Olkin. Lucy’s scientific instruments are mounted on a mobile pointing platform attached to the spacecraft. Tracking cameras deliver images to the on-board computers, which fix the scientific instruments on the target regardless of the position of the spacecraft. Lucy is collecting data for the full rotation of each asteroid, some of which are spinning faster than others.
The probe will hit the first target in 2025, an asteroid between Mars and Jupiter named 52246 Donaldjohanson, after the discoverer of Lucy’s skeleton. This is not a Trojan, but rather a test flyby for the mission. Through observation campaigns, scientists found that Donaldjohanson is likely only 100 million years old, making it one of the youngest objects in the solar system and a stand-alone target worth exploring.
Two years later, the spacecraft will fly next to the first Trojan asteroid 3548 Eurybates, which also has a tiny moon, Queta. Eurybates was once part of another destroyed asteroid. Such an origin could also explain its moon. The second target, 15094 Polymele, is the smallest of the non-moon targets for Lucy. Planetary scientists will closely observe its surface and density properties. , Objects that formed closer to the sun are denser than objects that formed further away.
The spacecraft will next fly the asteroid 11351 Leucus, which is a “slow rotator” whose day lasts about 400 hours. Of particular interest is its shape. The last asteroid of the first loop of Lucy’s trajectory is 21,900 Orus. Scientists are interested. in differences between their terrain and that of Eurybates.
In 2028, Lucy will begin her journey from one side of the solar system to the other to visit the Trojan Swarm opposite. After passing Earth to gain speed, in 2033 the spacecraft will fly to 617 Patroklos and Menoetius, binary asteroids orbiting around a common center of mass. These are some of the largest Trojans known, and scientists want to know if their pairing is a sign that they came from more distant areas of the solar system, where these binaries are more common.
After this final scheduled encounter, NASA could expand the mission to examine more small bodies, but even if the mission ends in the 2030s there could be another act: Lucy will continue to fly through the Jupiter-Lagrange points and turn backwards. Land, back and forth, back and forth. As such, the agency has provided Lucy with a “time capsule” of poetry, quotes and lyrics in the hope that future people traveling through space will one day be able to recover the spaceship and share it with our descendants. . an indication of what life must have been like in the prehistoric age of the 21st century.
If Lucy returns data suggesting that the Trojans formed in different locations at different distances from the Sun and then dragged into their current orbits, it would be significant corroborative evidence for the Nice model.
On the other hand, when Lucy’s main mission is complete and all the data is returned, it could have revealed something completely unexpected about the evolution of the solar system. That, says the head of mission, would be good.
“My hope,” said Dr. Levison, “will be to look at the current patterns of solar system formation, including my own work, and say,” No, this is all wrong.
