Campaign Objectives

• Objectives
• Observations
• Spectral Observations Summary

Lucy will launch in October 2021 and, with boosts from Earth's gravity, will complete a 12-year journey to seven different asteroids — a Main Belt asteroid and six Trojans. One of the Trojan asteroid targets is a known binary system, 617 Patroclus with its satellite Menoetius. The bodies span a range of compositional classes, denoted as C-, P- and D-types.

The Earth-based observational campaign has four major objectives:

• Ongoing astrometry to improve the precise knowledge of each target's location in space.
• Photometric observations of the rotational light curves for each object, pinning down with precision the rotational phases and orientations of each destination target, at the time of encounter. Phase curves over the phase angle range observable from Earth will be combined with the high phase angle measurements by the Lucy spacecraft to constrain the surface properties of each object.
• Mutual event lightcurves for the Patroclus-Menoetius system, as announced in the "News" link above.