The Lucy spacecraft is on a 12-year journey to visit eight different asteroids, and it’s almost caught up with the first space rock on its checklist.
Wedged between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the main asteroid belt contains over 1 million rocky objects, but perhaps few of them are as intriguing as Psyche. The metal-rich asteroid might have once been an ancient planetary building block that was stripped of its outer rocky shell as our solar system came to be.…
The Lucy spacecraft is getting closer to its first asteroid encounter, a small, stony celestial body that was recently added to the mission’s itinerary.