Spacecraft · tracked live
Lucy
A twelve-year tour of the Trojan asteroids that ride ahead of and behind Jupiter in its orbit - leftovers of the outer Solar System, held in place for four billion years. It will visit more asteroids than any spacecraft before it, and is named after the fossil, for the same reason.
- Agency
- NASA
- Launched
- 2021-10-16 - still working
- From the Sun
- 765,270,621 km (+444,380 km/d)
- From the Earth
- 903,606,167 km (+1,229,632 km/d)
- A signal takes
- 50 min
- Travelling at
- 9.1 km/s
Distances and speed are computed from JPL Horizons trajectories and are true of the date below, changing at the rate beside each.
Path
A loop round the Sun that Earth flybys keep stretching, out to the two swarms of asteroids that ride ahead of and behind Jupiter. One pass through each, twelve years of it.
Along the way
- First Earth flyby
- Passed Dinkinesh and found it has a moon of its own
- Second Earth flyby, aimed at the Trojans
- Passed Donaldjohanson in the main belt
Everything the map shows is worked out in your browser from published orbital data - nothing on it is a stored picture of where things were.