NASA Prepares Two Future Asteroid Missions

In its endeavor to explore outer space as much as possible in order to better understand the world around us, NASA has announced two new asteroid missions in the coming decade. The mission will involve learning more about asteroid found in Jupiter’s gravity as well as those located in the solar system’s asteroid belt.

The first of the two asteroid missions part of the Discovery Program is titled Lucy and is scheduled to launch in 2021 towards Jupiter. Scientists calculated that it will arrive in its orbit in 2025, where it will begin studying Trojan asteroids trapped in the planet’s gravity. Its mission will last between 2027 and 2033 as it will explore up to six Trojan asteroids in two groups.

One group leads and the other one trails Jupiter in a 12-year circuit around the sun. The Trojan asteroids are of interest to scientists because they are relics of a previous era in the history of our solar system. The Lucy spacecraft is designed to help scientists learn as much as possible from the analysis of six asteroids.

The Lucy spacecraft will be developed by Lockheed Martin, while the overall mission will be managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center located in Greenbelt, Maryland.  According to NASA’s statement, the development of the spacecraft will cost around $450 million.

The second mission announced as part of NASA’s Discovery Program will consist in exploring a particular asteroid found in the solar system’s asteroid belt. This specific asteroid known as Psyche garnered the attention of scientists because it is a unique metal asteroid which has never been visited before.

The Psyche mission is scheduled to launch in 2023 and has quite a long way to go considering that the 16 Psyche asteroid is located at three times the distance between Earth and the sun. Furthermore, the asteroid itself is quite large in size, measuring a diameter of 130 miles.

What makes it particularly interesting to scientists is the fact that it mostly comprised of metals such as iron and nickel, unlike other asteroids which have rocky or icy bodies. Scientists are eager to learn if the asteroid is the exposed core of a former planet.

Image source: Wikimedia