How NASA Plans To Find New Secrets About Our Solar System
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In 1992, NASA founded a Discovery Program as a series of low-cost highly-focused space missions for the US that meant to explore our Solar System. On January 4, 2017, the US Space Agency has announced that it has selected two new planetary missions of Discovery program to study strange asteroids.
The NASA claims that these missions will help us discover new secrets about the infancy of our solar system - from the time period when our Sun was just 10 million years old!
Today, the sun is believed to about 4.5 billion years old. It is 300 degrees hotter than the time it was first born, and its radius is believed to have increased by 6% since then. It still has 5 billion years to go though the life on Earth may only last a few hundred million years only, as the Sun is heating up. Universe Today suggests that when the Earth becomes too hot to sustain life, we may have to re-locate to other hospitable planets or move Earth itself further away from the Sun.
The two missions selected by NASA are:
Lucy will take off in October 2021
Lucy will visit an asteroid situated in the belt between Mars and Jupiter in 2025. It will then visit six different bodies known as Trojans between 2027 and 2033. Trojans can be seen swarming in front of or behind the Jupiter, trapped there by its gravitational force. They may be captured asteroids, comets, or other Kuiper Belt objects.
It is believed that Trojans are fossilized primordial material that made outer planets. Hence, they can help us to decipher the discovery of our Solar System.
Psyche will take off in October 2023
Pscyhe will land on a very large and rare asteroid made of metal. Named 16 Psyche, this metallic asteroid is 130-mile wide, and is made of metals like iron and nickel, much like Earth's core.
It might be the exposed core of an ancient Mars-sized planet, whose rocky layers might have been knocked off by violent collisions billions of years ago.
Psyche will land on this asteroid in 2030.
