Global News shows that NASA launched a first-of-its-kind mission on Saturday, Oct. 16 to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids - 2 large clusters of space rock that scientists believe are remnants of primordial material that formed our solar system’s outer planets.
The space probe, dubbed Lucy, was packed inside a special cargo capsule carried by the Atlas V rocket from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin Corp.
Lucy is on a 12-year expedition to study a record number of asteroids and will be the first to explore the Trojans, thousands of rocky objects orbiting the sun in two swarms - one ahead of the path of the giant gas planet Jupiter and one behind it.
Scientists hope Lucy’s close-up fly-by of 7 Trojans will yield new clues to how the solar system’s planets formed some 4.5 billion years ago.
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