The Lucy probe sets out to attack Jupiter’s “Trojan” asteroids

The situation is quite curious and relatively new in the field of space: when the Lucy probe takes off (scheduled for this Saturday at 11:34 a.m. from Cape Canaveral, Florida), it will only be four years since the mission was accepted. by NASA when it will take another six years to reach its destination! This highlights two things: how quickly it was designed and how far away the objects it is going to visit are.

Read alsoJupiter’s heart reveals its secrets

Lucy’s goal is to fly over some of Jupiter’s “Trojan” asteroids, a family that has never been visited before. These are two “clouds” located in the same orbit as Jupiter, in two areas of gravitational equilibrium before and after the gas giant.. If only ten thousand have been identified to date, they would combine together 1.6 million objects over a kilometer.

But why “Trojans”? While asteroids are mostly named with the names of heroines or