Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space

Center episode 289 Lucy. I'm Gary Jordan and I'll be your host today. On this podcast,

we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know what's

going on in the world of human spaceflight. But if you've been an active listener, you know

that we don't really stick that out all the time. We talk about Artemis a lot in this

podcast and the number of benefits of sustained lunar exploration. Of course, one of which

is the science of the moon, science which can help us to understand more about the solar

system. The same with other missions we've covered on our podcast, Lycosyrus Rex, we're

turning a sample from a carbonaceous asteroid to give us hints into learning about the

formation of life in the universe. These are big questions that add to our understanding

of the history of, well, everything. And scientists continue to come up with ideas

for how to answer these big questions. One mission that launched in 2021 has an ambitious

goal of learning about the formation of the solar system by visiting eight asteroids in

12 years. The mission is called Lucy. And you're not going to believe this. It's not an

acronym, but it's named Lucy for a fascinating reason all the same and we'll get into it

in this episode. This year, Lucy visits the first asteroid and scientists are excited.

So to discuss the Lucy mission and the big questions that it can help us to answer ahead

of this fascinating milestone, we're bringing on the principal investigator Hal Levison from

the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. All right, let's get started. Enjoy.

Hal Levison, thank you so much for coming on Houston. We have a podcast today. It's my pleasure.

It's, I think it's my pleasure, truly. You are the go-to guy when it comes to Lucy,

been doing talking about Lucy quite a bit since it's launched before it's launched. And if I'm

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