THE LUCY MISSION

The NASA L'SPACE Program is the student collaboration portion of NASA'S Lucy Mission to the Trojan Asteroids. Lucy will be the first space mission to explore a population of small bodies known as the Trojans. The Trojans are outer Solar System asteroids that orbit the Sun “in front of” and “behind” the gas giant Jupiter, at the same distance from the Sun as Jupiter. The gas giant is massive enough that normally it scatters away all asteroids in its vicinity, but, due to the combined gravitational influences of the Sun and Jupiter, these Trojan asteroids have been trapped on stable orbits (around what is known as  the Lagrange Points) for billions of years. These Trojans provide a unique, never-before-explored sample of the remnants of our early Solar System.