NASA's Lucy mission is ready to launch and explore never-before-seen asteroids - CNN

The Trojan asteroids, which borrow their name from Greek mythology, orbit the sun in two swarms -- one that's ahead of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, and a second one that lags behind it.

Lucy will provide the first high-resolution images of what these asteroids look like.

Lucy is the first spacecraft designed to visit and observe these asteroids, which are remnants from the early days of our solar system.

That will make Lucy the first spacecraft to travel to Jupiter and return to Earth.

The skeleton has helped researchers piece together aspects of human evolution, and the NASA Lucy team members hope their mission will achieve a similar feat regarding the history of our solar system.

The Trojans "are held there by the gravitational effect of Jupiter and the sun, so if you put an object there early in the solar system's history, it's been stable forever," said Hal Levison, the principal investigator of the Lucy mission, based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

It took a team of more than 500 engineers and scientists to conceptualize and build the spacecraft, said Donya Douglas-Bradshaw, Lucy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"Lucy will be NASA's first mission to travel this far away from the sun without nuclear power," said Joan Salute, associate director for flight programs at NASA's Planetary Science Division."In order to generate enough energy, Lucy has two very large circular solar arrays that open up like Chinese fans.

The instruments will enable the science team to search for moons around these asteroids as well as craters on their surfaces, which can help determine their ages as well as the origin and evolution of the asteroids.

Lucy will fly by the asteroids at about 15,000 miles per hour (6,705 meters per second), about four times slower than when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft zipped by Pluto and the distant object Arrokoth, said Hal Weaver, principal investigator for Lucy's L'LORRI instrument at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Lucy will also be about 600 miles (965 kilometers) away from each asteroid during its flyby, as opposed to around 2,000 miles (3,218 kilometers) away from the Arrokoth flyby, which means the Trojan images will have four times better resolution.

Once the Lucy mission has finished, the team plans to propose an extended mission to explore more Trojans.