NASA’s Lucy mission aims to explore lots of Trojan asteroids, meaning that there’s a lot of astronomical work to do. The cosmic journey will last for 12 years, meaning that there’s a lot of time available for gathering precious information.
According to CNN, the Lucy spacecraft will be carrying various messages from Earth, including lyrics from the Beatles as well as a poem written by National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman.
Donald Johanson, an anthropologist, spoke about how NASA’s spacecraft was named, as quoted by CNN:
That night in camp, in the middle of nowhere, when we were celebrating her discovery, we were listening to a Beatles tape of ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
The song ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ was playing, and someone said, ‘Why don’t you just call her Lucy?’ and that was it; you could not go back and call her anything else.
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will remain in a stable orbit after it completes the exploration of the Trojan asteroids. Lucy will keep traveling between our planet and the asteroids for God knows how long. Therefore, a lot of messages were added to the gold plaque carried by the spacecraft.
Surely everybody has in mind that NASA astronomers are hoping for hypothetical extraterrestrial civilizations to see the messages that Lucy will be carrying into space. And we must not rule out the idea completely, that’s for sure! A space agency could take such a decision for various reasons, including to provide future space explorers the chance to see what other astronomers were doing near the Trojan asteroids.
Trojan asteroids are those space rocks that share the same orbit as Jupiter, the biggest planet from our Solar System.