NASA’s latest spacecraft for exploration launched this weekend. The mission will take it on a 12 year journey to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.

Wall Street used a familiar tool to design the complex path of this mission: MicrosoftExcel

Lucy, the spacecraft that orbits around Earth. Lockheed MartinBuilt by United Launch Alliance, the Atlas V rocket was launched Saturday for NASA. It is scheduled to cover 4 billion miles in space and will be used to study eight asteroids.

Brian Sutter, Lockheed Martin’s mission architect used Excel years before Lucy flew. Excel helped him chart the course of his mission and decide which of approximately 5,000 Trojan asteroids he should take the spacecraft to.

Sutter stated to CNBC that part of science was trying to see as many Trojans in one mission.

Lockheed Martin offers a high-fidelity tool for running individual trajectories. However, Sutter stated that this would have been impossible to use and could take “forever.” Instead, he turned to Excel macros which are “perfectly suited” for sorting large amounts of data.

Sutter stated, “I already had a track that linked two asteroids to Earth,”

Orbit propagation – or modeling the future location of objects in space – “is what I do,” Sutter explained. Although his macro may contain “different equations” than what you might normally use in Excel, he said that the final result is all math.

Sutter created a large list of 750,000 asteroids from which he entered Excel data to “see” if they had accidentally come within a few hundred miles of each other.

Sutter claimed that it took the machine 12 hours to process all 750,000 of these asteroids. Sutter said that he was left with a “small list” of 10-20 asteroids to which the spacecraft could be flying.

Lockheed Martin became famous for his use of Excel to chart Lucy’s path. He recalls that his colleague described Sutter as having “made the most complicated Excel spreadsheet that I have ever seen” to help chart Lucy’s trajectory.

Lucy’s mission costs $981 million and is scheduled to reach its first asteroid in 2024. Up to 2033 will see more flybys.

Although the spacecraft was launched successfully and is now stable NASA stated on Sunday that the one solar array of the spacecraft “may not have been fully latched”.

NASA declared that Lucy will continue operating without danger to its safety and health. NASA said that the team was currently analyzing data from spacecraft to assess the situation and to determine the next steps in achieving full solar array deployment.