LUCY Mission Patch

LUCY Mission Patch Lucy is a NASA space probe that will complete a 12-year journey to eight different asteroids, visiting a main belt asteroid as well as seven Jupiter trojans, asteroids which share Jupiter's orbit around the Sun, orbiting either ahead of or behind the planet. All target encounters will be fly-by encounters. The Lucy spacecraft is the centerpiece of a US$981 million mission. On 4 January 2017, Lucy was chosen, along with the Psyche mission, as NASA's Discovery Program missions 13 and 14 respectively. The mission is named after the Lucy hominin skeleton, because the study of Trojans could reveal the "fossils of planet formation": materials that clumped together in the early history of the Solar System to form planets and other bodies. The Australopithecus itself was named after the 1967 Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Launch Date: October 16 Rocket: Atlas V Launch Site: Cape Canaveral SLC-41