Lucy in The Sky! The First Mission to the Trojan Asteroids | Star Party

Lucy in The Sky! The First Mission to the Trojan Asteroids
w/ Dr. Joel Parker

abstract
The Lucy mission launched on October 16, 2021 to begin a 12-year journey to explore the Jupiter Trojans, the last major reservoir of Solar System small bodies not yet explored by spacecraft. The Trojans are a key dynamical class that likely have remained stable in their distant orbits for billions of years, containing a sample of bodies from different parts of the Solar System captured after migration of the outer planets. As such, they can be considered as well-preserved "fossils" of the early epoch of planetary formation. I will present an overview of the Lucy mission and spacecraft, the science motivations and what we currently know about the Trojans, and what has happened so far in the first three years of the mission.

bio
Dr. Joel Parker is a Director in the Boulder office of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Professor Adjoint at the University of Colorado. He worked at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center studying hot, massive stars in neighboring galaxies, and at SwRI his projects have involved research of solar system objects such as comets, the Moon, asteroids, and trans-Neptunian / Kuiper belt objects. He has done research at ground-based observatories around the world as well as with space-based telescopes including the International Ultraviolet Explorer spacecraft, the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope that flew aboard the Space Shuttle, and for the past 30 years with the Hubble Space Telescope for over two dozen projects ranging from one of the first known interstellar comets to other galaxies and their stars that are over a hundred times the mass of our Sun. He was a Principal Investigator for the Alice ultraviolet spectrograph instrument on the Rosetta mission to comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko and the project manager for similar spectrographs on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper belt. Dr. Parker also is a science team member and Assistant Project Scientist on New Horizons and the manager of the Science Operations Center for NASA's Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids. He is an actor and musician, and is a producer and host for the science show "How on Earth" on radio station KGNU.

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