The Lucy Plaque - Lucy Mission
The first spacecraft to leave the Solar System carried with them messages from Earth for any intelligent life that may one day encounter them. The Lucy Mission continues this tradition, but the plaque it carries as a time capsule is not for unknown aliens, but for our own decedents. After the mission is over, the Lucy spacecraft will remain on a stable orbit—travelling between the Earth and the Trojan asteroids for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. It is not hard to imagine that some day in the distant future our decedents may retrieve the Lucy spacecraft as a relic of the early days of humanity’s exploration of the Solar System.
Therefore the spacecraft carries a plaque as a time capsule, including messages from prominent thinkers of our time and a diagram showing the positions of the planets on the date of Lucy’s launch.
This alone is what I wish for you: knowledge. To understand each desire has an edge, to know we are responsible for the lives we change. No faith comes without cost, no one believes without dying.
