Next month NASA's Lucy probe will visit an asteroid that's been waiting 150 million years to say hello
From - Space.com By - Julian Dossett Edited by - Amal Udawatta An artist's depiction of the Lucy spacecraft flying past a pair of Trojan asteroids. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) "These relics are effectively fossils of the planet formation process, holding vital clues to deciphering the history of our solar system." The next stop for NASA's asteroid-hopping spacecraft Lucy is a space rock named Donaldjohanson, an object researchers recently learned is about 150 million years old. Lucy will fly past the three-mile-wide (five-kilometer-wide) asteroid on April 20, but the trip mostly serves as a rehearsal for other asteroid encounters down the road — namely, Lucy's final destination: Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. Over a 12-year mission, Lucy is scheduled to visit a total of 11 asteroids across two swarms that are leading and trailing Jupiter . Still, every asteroid counts for this mission, and a new paper from res...