Trojan asteroids – Astronomy Now

Lucy mission gets another asteroid target – a tiny moon

10 January 2020 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Lucy probe will visit a record seven asteroids during its 12-year mission, including one recently found to feature a small moon.

Two asteroid missions get nod from NASA

11 January 2017 Stephen Clark

NASA has selected two robotic missions to visit asteroids in the early 2020s from a field of proposed interplanetary probes, approving projects to explore a metallic relic from the early solar system and a half-dozen so-called Trojan objects left over from the formation of the outer planets.

Finding new worlds with a play of light and shadow

1 November 2015 Astronomy Now

One method to discover planets beyond the solar system by far is transit photometry, which measures changes in a star’s brightness when a planet crosses in front of its star along our line of sight. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has used this technique to become the most successful planet-hunting spacecraft to date, with more than a thousand established discoveries. Satellites carrying improved technology for all-sky surveys are now planned, missions that will tell us a great deal about alien planetary systems similar to our own.