NASA selects 2 asteroid spacecraft to study early solar system

2021 launch set for Lucy to Trojan asteroids, Psyche in 2023 to metal asteroid

Asteroids will be heavily studied in two new Discovery Program missions selected by NASA, the space agency announced on Wednesday.

Lucy, a robotic spacecraft set to launch in 2021, will study the asteroids trapped by Jupiter’s gravity known as the Trojan asteroids. 

Psyche, also a spacecraft, is named for the small metallic world it will visit and set to launch in 2023, NASA said.

Both missions will offer new clues about the origins of the solar system, less than 10 million years after the birth of the sun.

The Near Earth Object Camera or NEOCam was also awarded an extended grant by the agency for an additional year. NEOCam is a telescope designed to study potentially hazardous asteroids near Earth.

Lucy and Psyche were selected out of five finalist. Some members of the planetary science community were surprised that NASA did not select at least one of either Venus atmosphere missions that made it to the final round.

NASA has not sent a spacecraft to Venus since Magellan in 1994.

The Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy known as VERITAS and the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging as DAVINCI were not selected.

During a NASA news conference Lucy Principal Investigator Harold F. Levison, with the Southwest Research Institute, described the asteroids the spacecraft will study as some of the most diverse in the solar system.

"There is no other unique asteroid population ... that we can get to with a spacecraft like it," Levison said.

Lucy will visit up to six Trojan asteroids, measuring their density using newer versions of instruments used during New Horizons mission to Pluto. Several members of Lucy’s mission team also worked on the Pluto flyby.

Among the New Horizons veterans is University of Central Florida professor of physics Daniel Britt, who specializes in mineralogy of asteroids, and will also serve on the Lucy science team. 

While both missions are visiting the fossils of the solar system's formation, their objects of study will be vastly different.

Psyche will make the first visit to a main asteroid belt object made entirely of metals, like iron and nickel, similar to the Earth's core, according to NASA.

“This is an opportunity to explore a new type of world, not one of rock or ice, but of metal,” Psyche Principal Investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton, of Arizona State University, said.

Psyche is probably the metal core of a former planet, Elkins-Tanton said, and might be the only way humans will ever get a look at a planet's core.

"We are never going to Earth's core" because of the extreme temperature and drilling limitations, Elkins-Tanton explained.

Psyche's team plans to have a high amount of public reaction to the mission. Elkins-Tanton said they want to process and post images from Psyche's two imagers as quickly as they can.

NASA selects missions based on overall potential science and costs, Planetary Science Director Jim Green said, capping them at around $450 million. Discovery missions are relatively low-cost compared to other science missions.

Green said selecting two missions puts the Discovery Program back on track. NASA’s budget doesn’t always allow for more than one mission to be selected.

He added that the space agency is trying to get back to a Discovery mission launching every 32 to 36 months.

The last discovery mission, the Dawn spacecraft to asteroids Ceres and Vesta, launched more than five years ago.

A Discovery Program mission was set to launch in 2016, but a vacuum leak in Mars Insight Lander’s prime science instrument delayed the launch until May 2018. The mission will study the Red Planet’s interior to understand how rocky planets formed.

Learn more about the newly funded spacecraft in the NASA announcement below.


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