NASA is plunging into the solar system’s origins, selecting two planetary missions to visit mysterious asteroids. The agency has chosen Lucy, which will visit Jupiter's Trojan asteroids, and Psyche, which will orbit a large metal asteroid, for its next Discovery missions, its low-cost planetary science missions.
Lucy, set for a 2021 launch, will take advantage of a unique orbital moment to fly past six of Jupiter's Trojan asteroids, which follow the gas giant's orbit, a region previously unexplored by spacecraft. Launching in 2023, Psyche will orbit a rare iron and nickel asteroid of the same name, believed to be the stripped-bare core of an ancient planetesimal, testing whether such bodies could have formed molten cores.
“This is what Discovery program missions are all about," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C., said in a press release. "Boldly going to places we’ve never been to enable groundbreaking science.”
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