The Lucy Mission will be the first
spacecraft to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. These
small bodies orbit the Sun at the same distance as Jupiter
near the L4 and L5 Lagrange points that lead or follow Jupiter
in its orbit. These asteroids were captured at the close of an
early, chaotic phase of giant planet migration. The Lucy
mission will test the hypothesis that the Trojans are a
mixture of planetesimals that formed in the outer
protoplanetary disk and were subsequently scattered inward. In
this way we can think of the Trojans as a kind of fossil
record of the solar system preserved in a relatively
accessible location for more than 4 billion years.
The Lucy spacecraft will fly by 8 different asteroids during a
12-year mission, a record! During the flybys, Lucy will train
its cameras and spectrometers on these bodies to help uncover
clues that can help piece together their origins and
subsequent histories including collisions, heating and other
chemical processes. The Lucy spacecraft launched on October 16
to begin its epic journey of exploration.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Keith Noll is the Project Scientist for
the Lucy mission. Dr. Noll studies asteroids in the solar
system using instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, the
Keck telescope, and the just-launched James Webb Space
Telescope. He has been at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
since 2011 and before that was at the Space Telescope Science
Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. He obtained a B.S. in
Physics from St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, an M.S.
in Physics from the University of Illinois, and his Ph.D. in
Planetary Science from Stony Brook University.