Way Up in the Sky Already

The morning after scraping together a post that might amount to an empty boast just for the sake of saying something here “before too long,” the preview blurb on Astronomy Picture of the Day had me thinking a launch I’d known was coming up without quite being sure when might have happened. I went to the main NASA site and saw the Lucy space probe had indeed launched for the Trojan asteroids held in the Lagrange points of Jupiter’s orbit (familiar enough points for anyone with a reasonable awareness of Gundam).

Lucy will need years and several gravitational boosts from Earth flybys before it gets up to the first group of Trojan asteroids, so it shouldn’t matter that much that I was a few days late noticing this news. The thought I might have been distracted by the repeated stunt of William Shatner and three other people being rocketed to extreme altitudes last week and missed a chance to say something a bit more significant here might have been a bit of a reproach even so. In pondering this automated mission being sold as “the investigation of ‘space fossils’” and its name coming from the ancient skeleton as something of a distraction from that, I suppose I did confront this “Lucy” not being quite connected to the Apollo 10 call signs “Charlie Brown” and “Snoopy.”