DENVER, Aug. 2, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA's Lucy
spacecraft has officially arrived at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to begin
preparations ahead of its launch this fall.
"This spacecraft is so much more than a piece of hardware, it's
a work of art, and I'm incredibly proud of how the team came
together to build this through a global pandemic," said
Rich Lipe, Lockheed Martin Lucy
program manager. "To be here now, starting to prepare for launch,
is a terrific feeling."
Designed and built by Lockheed Martin for NASA, Lucy will give
humankind its first ever close-up look at Jupiter's elusive Trojan asteroids. These
celestial objects are important because scientists believe they
could hold clues about how our solar system and the planets
formed.
Shipping a Precious Package
In the pre-dawn hours Friday, Lucy took the first steps of its
12-year, four-billion-mile odyssey to the "fossils" of the solar
system by boarding a cargo plane in Colorado.
And moving a nearly one-ton spacecraft 18 months in the making
is no small feat.
After converting a shipping container into its own mini
cleanroom environment, a team of Lockheed Martin engineers
carefully placed Lucy inside and loaded the spacecraft onto a
special transport truck at the company's Littleton, Colorado, facility.
Flanked by its own police escort, the truck made its way to
Buckley Space Force Base in
Aurora, Colorado, where a team of
about 40 people from Lockheed Martin, NASA and Southwest Research
Institute met Lucy and tucked the spacecraft safely inside its C-17
transport aircraft.
After touching down on the Space Shuttle Landing Strip at
Kennedy Space Center, Lucy was
moved to Astrotech Space Operations, where it will begin
preparations for a 23-day launch window that opens Oct.
16.
What's Ahead in the Journey?
Following its pre-launch testing, launch vehicle integration and
liftoff on an Atlas V 401 rocket, the path that lies ahead will see
Lucy visit a record-breaking number of asteroids – eight, to be
precise.
As part of a highly complex orbital trajectory, Lucy will fly by
one Main Belt asteroid and seven Trojan asteroids – ancient objects
trapped within gravity wells created by the combined pull of
Jupiter and the sun, near
so-called Lagrange Points. One group
leads and one group trails Jupiter
in its orbit.
The spacecraft will use precise instruments to study the
geology, surface composition and physical properties of these
primitive Trojan asteroids. Scientific theory hypothesizes these
objects were scattered during the creation of our outer solar
system roughly 4 billion years ago and later captured in
Jupiter's orbit – remaining there,
undisturbed, for billions of years.
These genuine "fossils" of the solar system could hold clues
about what conditions were like when the planets formed, leading to
an even greater understanding of our own origins.
Lucy's first asteroid flyby occurs in 2025, and the last planned
flyby will be in 2033.
More About the Mission
For more than 50 years, Lockheed Martin has helped NASA explore
every planet in our solar system and continues to develop
new technologies for future space missions like Lucy.
Lucy is the seventh of 13 NASA Discovery-class missions in which
Lockheed Martin has participated. The company will also build two
NASA spacecraft headed to Venus at
the end of the decade.
Lockheed Martin Space designed, built, tested, and will operate
Lucy out of its Littleton,
Colorado, facility. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Maryland, provides
overall mission management, systems engineering and safety and
mission assurance. Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, is the principal
investigator institution and will operate the Science Operations
Center (SOC). Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery
Program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington, D.C.
Learn more about Lucy on Lockheed Martin's website. For photos,
check out the company's Flickr page.
About Lockheed Martin
Headquartered in Bethesda,
Maryland, Lockheed Martin (NYSE:
LMT) is a global security and aerospace company that employs
approximately 114,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged
in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and
sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and
services.
Please follow @LMNews on Twitter for the latest
announcements and news across the corporation.
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SOURCE Lockheed Martin