| Astrophysics (Index) | About |
Lucy (Discovery 13, an early-used name was Trojans' Odyssey) is a space probe traveling to the two Sun-Jupiter Lagrangian points in Jupiter's orbital path (the Trojan points), to investigate a number of asteroids at those locations (i.e., Trojan asteroids). Instruments:
Another instrument, TTCam (Terminal Tracking Camera, aka T2CAM) is actually two cameras used for guidance (TTCam-1 and TTCam-2). Radio science experiments will also be carried out. L'LORRI and L'Ralph are updated copies of New Horizons' LORRI and Ralph, and L'TES after an OSIRIS-REx instrument, the adoption of these instrument-designs for Lucy being the reason for using the same name with an "L apostrophe" prefix. L'Ralph is actually two instruments, MVIC (Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera) and LEISA (Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array).
Lucy was launched in October 2021 for a lengthy trip, to reach the Jupiter L4 point in 2027, and L5 point in 2033. In November 2023, Lucy carried out a trial observation while passing through the main belt, observing the asteroid, 152830 Dinkinesh, discovering it has a "binary moon". In April 2025, Lucy reached its first target-asteroid, 52246 Donaldjohanson, discovering it to be a contact binary (somewhat barbell-like shape) with a length of 8 kilometers.
The space probe, Lucy is named for the hominin fossil with that nickname, which was discovered in 1974. The Lucy fossil has been useful in studying the origin of humans, and the Lucy spacecraft asteroid observations promise to be useful in studying the origin of the solar system.