Our first big asteroid exploratory mission in more than a century is launched aboard the space shuttle Atlantis
NASA’s newest baby, Lucy, blasts off today, blasting through the heavens just 25 minutes after launch aboard a fiery shuttle from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft is targeting the largest asteroids that sit underneath Earth’s orbit.
Lucy and its mothership, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), launched at 5.18pm EDT (2.18pm BST) from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. After a two-day service call to launch Pad 39A, Lucy was sent on its long journey to an ultimate destination: the largest asteroid belt in the solar system.
Asteroids are rough, ragged land in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. An asteroid twice the size of the meteorite that flattened half a Texas town in 1908 might contain as much material as could fill a football field. A grain of sand.
The type of rock they come from can range from tiny, rocky asteroids to giant boulders with thousands of miles of Earth-bound exposure. Asteroids are responsible for what scientists think is the formation of the planets, as well as other giant bodies in the solar system. (You should know that asteroids are not actually asteroids. These tiny, tough structures are sometimes called space rocks, because they can be so impact-prone.)
With Lucy, a US space agency venture made possible by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, NASA hopes to better understand how rocks form and evolve, how they’re likely to affect our planet, and how they may have changed over the eons.
Once in orbit, Lucy will stay with TESS, using the new satellite’s huge field of view to map the outer solar system in unprecedented detail. Lucy, at 5.5m to 7.6m wide, will be long enough to photograph about 75% of the asteroids in the asteroid belt and the coma around the sun. The TESS spacecraft will be much smaller, at just a few thousand feet in diameter.
Asteroids orbit the sun in pairs, with one heading in our direction and the other slightly to the left. This constant presence of water and carbon-based molecules means that asteroids are rich in organic material. These materials can’ be left by organic molecules from the Earth, believed to have contributed to life in our planet’s beginnings.
When the two asteroids emerge from the sun’s influence into the solar system, their orbits are not perfectly close together. Like the pieces that make up a puzzle, the orbits of these two main groups of asteroids will make up the puzzle of our solar system.
In fact, Nasa launched a landmark mission last year, OSIRIS-REx, to look for water-containing organic molecules on the asteroid Bennu.
What we do know, according to Jim Green, director of Nasa’s planetary science division, is that most asteroids orbit the sun in pairs.
Now Lucy will go exploring, trying to figure out how big these binary asteroids are, which debris could sneak between them and cause them to break apart, and what other material, other than water, these asteroids have.
Some near-Earth asteroids may even have small cores of iron, an indication that they formed in very volatile and low-pressure environments on the early Earth.
In fact, NASA has been studying rocks on our own moon for years, looking for clues about the formation of our own home planet.
Further reading:
• Asteroids in an asteroid belt
• New asteroid survey mission to kick off
• Asteroids – the first mission of its kind?
