Context:
NASA is set to send its first spacecraft to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids to glean new insights into the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago.
Relevance:
GS III- Awareness In The Fields Of It, Space, Computers, Robotics, Nano-Technology, Bio-Technology, Pharma Sector & Health Science
Dimensions of the article:
- About Lucy Mission
- Asteroids
About Lucy Mission
- It is named after an ancient fossil 3.2 million-year-old ancestor who belonged to a species of hominins.
- It is a 12-year journey of eight different asteroids including one in the Main Belt between Mars & Jupiter and seven Trojans.
- It is NASA’s first single spacecraft mission in history to explore so many different asteroids.
- Lucy will run on solar power out to 850 million km away from the Sun.
- This makes it the farthest-flung solar-powered spacecraft ever, according to NASA.
Aim & Objective:
- To get insights into the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.
- Investigating the group of rocky bodies that are circling the Sun in two swarms- one preceding Jupiter and the other trailing behind it.
Donald Johnson Asteroid:
- The spacecraft’s first encounter will be with an asteroid that lies in the main belt that can be found between Mars and Jupiter.
- This asteroid is named ‘Donald Johnson’ after the paleoanthropologist who discovered the fossilised remains of “Lucy”.
Asteroids:
Rocky objects revolving around the sun that are too small to be called planets.
Classification based on their orbits:
- Main asteroid belt b/w Mars and Jupiter.
- Trojan asteroids orbit a larger planet in two special places, known as Lagrange points, where the gravitational pull of the sun and the planet are balanced.
- NASA reports the presence of Jupiter, Neptune and Mars trojans. In 2011, they reported an Earth trojan as well.
- Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA), circle closer to Earth than the sun.
Lagrange points
- Lagrange points are the locations in space where the combined gravitational pull of two large masses roughly balance each other.
- Any small mass placed at that location will remains at constant distances relative to the large masses.
- There are five such points in Sun-Earth system and they are denoted as L1, L2, L3, L4 and L5.
-Souce: Indian Express
