NASA's asteroid spacecraft Lucy launches this week on ambitious 12-year mission - Space.com

After blastoff, the spacecraft will make a 12-year journey to the outer solar system, where it will visit half a dozen ancient "Trojan" asteroids that orbit in the same path as the planet Jupiter.

This ambitious mission will include a number of firsts — Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit asteroids in this region and the first to make a flyby of Earth from the outer solar system.

Related: Lucy mission to explore 7 trojan asteroids explained by NASA.

The skeleton itself was named after the Lucy in the 1967 Beatles tune, "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds," a song to which excavators danced during the 1974 expedition that uncovered the skeleton, NASA said in a 2017 press release about the Lucy mission.

NASA drew inspiration from the Lucy skeleton, which to the agency represents the beginning of humans, in naming a mission that aims to teach us more about the beginnings of our solar system. .

One small world will be located in the "main belt" of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, while the other seven are Trojans.

Notably, four of the seven Trojans are paired up, allowing Lucy to view two asteroids simultaneously with each of those particular visits.

The mission will target a range of different kinds of asteroid bodies: C-type (chondrite, common ancient asteroids made of clay and silicate), D-type (asteroids with low albedos or reflectivity, which may be rich in organic molecules) and P-type (more asteroids with low albedos that may also be rich in organics, although we have no samples yet on Earth to confirm this).

"The C-types are found mostly in the outer parts of the main belt of asteroids, between Mars and Jupiter.

— Scientists identify tiny satellite around an asteroid NASA's Lucy spacecraft will visit.

— NASA asteroid mission Lucy begins spacecraft assembly before 2021 launch.

Lucy will also build on numerous recent missions concerning asteroids, including NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission that is currently headed for Earth with a sample from asteroid Bennu and Japan's Hayabusa2 that returned to Earth in late 2020 with dust from asteroid Ryugu.