Where is Lucy right now?
Lucy is currently about 813,056,858 kilometres from Earth, roughly 5.43 astronomical units, or 45.2 light-minutes away, and 4.97 astronomical units from the Sun. It is outbound toward the Jupiter Trojans.
Lucy is going to the Trojans: two swarms of asteroids sharing Jupiter's orbit, one running ahead of the planet and one behind, held in place by the balance between Jupiter's gravity and the Sun's. They are thought to be left over from the material the outer planets were built from. Nothing has ever visited one.
It launched on 16 October 2021 and has spent the years since gaining speed on Earth flybys and rehearsing on two main belt asteroids: Dinkinesh in November 2023 and Donaldjohanson in April 2025. Dinkinesh turned out to have a moon, and the moon turned out to be two objects stuck together, a shape nobody had seen orbiting an asteroid before.
Right now it is coasting and testing cameras. In the spring of 2026 it photographed Eurybates, Polymele, Leucus and Orus from a great distance, and the team spent July working through the images to pick settings for the encounters themselves.
The first is Eurybates, on 12 August 2027. Four Trojan flybys follow through November 2028, then Lucy comes back to Earth for a slingshot in 2030 and crosses to the trailing swarm for Patroclus and Menoetius in 2033. Eleven asteroids in twelve years.