NASA ’s Lucy is a platter - break mission that will take a criminal record - breaking 11 asteroids across the Solar System . Three of them are already under its belted ammunition ; it passed close to asteroid Dinkinesh last yr anddiscovered a double moonaround the small objective . Next twelvemonth , it will visit asteroid Donaldjohanson before flee towards the Trojan asteroid , rocks that deal their orbits with Jupiter . To do that , it will want a little help from Earth .
The ballistic capsule is rapidly approaching our planet at high amphetamine and will utilize Earth ’s gravitative pull to gain a fair scrap of speed . On December 13 ( this Friday ) , it will strive a decimal point 350 kilometers ( 217 mile ) from the surface of the satellite – that is secretive than the typical orbit of the International Space Station .
The encounter will boost Lucy ’s velocity by 7.2 klick ( 4.5 miles ) per second with respect to the Sun . If you want to see it streak across the sky , the team at theVirtual Telescope Projecthas got you cover up .
After visiting Donaldjohanson , Lucy will reach the first group of Trojans – the ones preceding Jupiter in its orbit – in the summer of 2027 . First , it will claver Eurybates and its moon on August 12 ; the follow month will be a opportunity for it to get a closer facial expression at Polymele and its artificial satellite . Six months later , on April 18 , 2028 , it will be the turn of Leucus and in November of the same year , Orus .
Lucy will then fell back to Earth , where a more distant flyby will transmit it toward the Trojans that follow Jupiter , localize to meet the binary asteroid Patroclus – Menoetius on March 2 , 2033 .
The Trojans are think to be unchanged building blocks of the Solar System and have been name its " fossils " – that ’s why the spacecraft is called Lucy .
The name is portion out withthe iconic human root Lucy , whose discovery overturn palaeontology . The dodo , in twist , is named afterLucy in the Sky with diamond , the famous Beatles song . Lucy ’s first fair game asteroid , Dinkinesh , is named after the Ethiopian name for the Lucy fossil , which translates to " you are howling . "
