NASA successfully launched the Lucy mission, which is set to explore the Donaldjohanson asteroid and seven of the Trojan asteroids surrounding Jupiter, on the morning of Oct. 16.

The mission was launched on an Atlas V rocket made by United Launch Alliance—which was previously tapped for the US Space Force’s first satellite launch, the delayed Orbital Flight Test-2 mission involving the Boeing Starliner, and other missions—from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. NASA said it’s currently at roughly 67,000 mph.

“Named for the fossilized skeleton of one of our earliest known hominin ancestors,” NASA said, “the Lucy mission will allow scientists to explore two swarms of Trojan asteroids that share an orbit around the Sun with Jupiter. Scientific evidence indicates that Trojan asteroids are remnants of the material that formed giant planets. Studying them can reveal previously unknown information about their formation and our solar system’s evolution in the same way the fossilized skeleton of Lucy revolutionized our understanding of human evolution.”

Lucy will be NASA’s first mission to visit the Trojan asteroids; it will also see the most asteroids of any of the agency’s missions to date. All that exploration is going to take some time: NASA said that it expects the mission to reach Donaldjohanson in 2025, encounter the first Trojan asteroids in 2027, and then finally view the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm in 2033.

Those encounters will be enabled by a series of Earth gravity assists in 2022, 2024, and 2031. The first two assists are supposed to allow Lucy to reach Donaldjohanson and the leading Trojan asteroid swarm, which the mission will view with “four targeted flybys,” and the final assist is supposed to enable it to reach the trailing swarm of Trojan asteroids 12 years after this launch.

“We started working on the Lucy mission concept early in 2014, so this launch has been long in the making,” Lucy principal investigator Hal Levison said in a statement. “It will still be several years before we get to the first Trojan asteroid, but these objects are worth the wait and all the effort because of their immense scientific value. They are like diamonds in the sky.”