Why Nasa is launching robo archaeologist named Lucy

Nasa is scheduled on Satu-rday to launch a probe to-ward clusters of asteroids along Jupiter’s orbital path.

- David W. Brown

They are known as the Trojan swarms, and they represent the final unexplored regions of asteroids in the solar system. The spacecraft, a deep-space robotic archaeologist named Lucy, will seek to answer questions about the origins of the solar system, how the planets migrated to their current orbits and how life might have emerged on Earth.

“We have never gone this far to study asteroids,” said Bill Nelson, the administrator of Nasa. “In so doing, we’re going to be able to better understand the formation of solar system.”