NASA announces 2 discovery missions to study Asteroids. NASA's next planetary mission will attempt to unravel the mysterious of some seriously bizarre asteroids.

According to SPACE, NASA has selected two projects called Lucy and Psyche via its Discovery program. The Lucy project will investigate the Trojan asteroids while Psyche will journey to the asteroids belt to study metallic asteroid named 16 psyches.

NASA official has reported, Lucy is scheduled to launch on October 21. The probe will visit main asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter in 2025 and then go on to study asteroids between 2027 and 2033.

NBC NEWS has reported, there are two streams of Trojan asteroids. One trails Jupiter and the other leads the giant planet around the sun.

The NASA scientist thinks both streams may be planetary building blocks that formed far from the Sun before being captured into their current orbits by Jupiter powerful gravity. However, the 2 discovery funds highly focussed space missions to destinations throughout the solar system.

Harold Levison, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, has reported this is a unique opportunity as the Trojans are remnants of the primordial material that formed the outer planets.

However, Lucy and Psyche were among five discovery finalists that NASA announced their last year conference. NASA official has stated the dangerous-asteroid-hunting-Near Earth Object Camera (NEOCam), will get an additional year's worth of funding for continued development.

Psyche is considered one of the oldest objects in the solar system. This is a 130-mile-wide metallic asteroid; the size may be the core of an ancient, Mars -Size planet. The NASA scientist says violent collisions of billions of years ago might have stripped the layers of rock that once lay atop this metallic object.

Meanwhile, the NASA official the Discovery program was founded in 1992 that supports relatively low-cost planetary missions: development costs for the current crop are capped at about $450 million apiece.

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