NASA launches Lucy probe on 12-year flight to visit eight remote asteroids
CBSN
NASA's billion-dollar Lucy probe rocketed into space with a pre-dawn launch on Saturday, kicking off a 12-year, 4-billion-mile quest to make close flybys of eight unusual asteroids that represent the preserved building blocks of the solar system.
Known as Trojans, the asteroids circle the sun well beyond the main belt of rocky debris between Mars and Jupiter. They're clustered in two gravitationally bound "swarms" in the same orbit as the giant planet, one group 60 degrees ahead and the other 60 degrees behind.
NASA's Lucy probe, named after the 3.2-million-year-old bones of a celebrated early human ancestor, was launched on a trajectory setting up three velocity-boosting Earth flybys to send it first past an asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter and then on to five asteroids in one Trojan swarm and two in the other.
An Arizona grand jury indicted 18 people Wednesday in the ongoing investigation into an alleged attempt to use alternate electors after the 2020 presidential election as part of a wider alleged conspiracy to falsely declare then-President Donald Trump the winner, the state's attorney general announced.
Almost four out of every 10 people in the United States live in a place where air pollution is considered bad enough to put their health at risk, the American Lung Association warned in its latest "State of the Air" report released on Wednesday. That proportion of people — about 39% of the population — had risen sharply since earlier rounds of pollutant data were analyzed for the annual report last year, and the trends were especially pronounced in certain parts of the country.