The Lucy spacecraft, which was equipped with defective solar panels and was destined for eight asteroids in outer space, had just been repaired a few days when its team discovered a rare system: an asteroid with its own moon. The smallest Trojan asteroid target for the mission, Polymele, has been discovered to have a satellite.
The most recent discovery gives Lucy’s mission, which travels through deep space to examine the primordial remains of the formation of our solar system, a new target. This could provide important new information about how Earth and other planets orbiting the Sun were formed.
‘Solving these questions is a top priority because asteroids provide crucial clues to understanding the history of the solar system and potentially even the origins of life. Asteroids that lead and trail Jupiter in its orbit around the Sun are known as Trojan asteroids, and the Lucy team originally intended to visit one main belt asteroid and six of them’ In a statement, NASA said.
When it was discovered in March, the asteroid was 770 million kilometres from the Earth. Now, NASA intends to include this moonlet on the mission’s goals list for Lucy, which was launched in October of last year.
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