NASA’s Lucy spacecraft simply pulled off its second asteroid flyby and imaged a frankly tasty-looking rock: a peanut-shaped asteroid named Donaldjohanson.
The rectangular asteroid is a fraction of a long-destroyed house rock that shaped roughly 150 million years in the past, and Lucy swooped inside 600 miles (960 kilometers) of it on April 20, 2025, capturing some severely wild close-ups.
“These early photos of Donaldjohanson are once more displaying the great capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,” mentioned Tom Statler, NASA program scientist for the Lucy mission, in an company release. “The potential to essentially open a brand new window into the historical past of our photo voltaic system when Lucy will get to the Trojan asteroids is immense.”
Donaldjohanson—named for the anthropologist who found the fossilized hominid Lucy again in 1974, which provides the spacecraft its title—is comparatively small, at roughly 5 miles (8 km) throughout. However that’s bigger than earlier estimates; only a few months in the past, when Lucy was farther away, researchers estimated that Donaldjohanson was about 3 miles (4 km) throughout.
Beneath you possibly can see the asteroid because it appeared 45 million miles (70 million kilometers) from the spacecraft. Suffice to say, the brand new photos give us a greater view of the traditional rock.
Lucy bought a sneak peek of the principle belt asteroid back in February, because the spacecraft prepares to discover the Trojan asteroids as far out as Jupiter. Donaldjohanson isn’t a Trojan asteroid, but it surely was conveniently positioned for NASA’s Lucy spacecraft to swing by on a scenic detour en path to its predominant vacation spot.
The flyby gave NASA researchers a possibility to check Lucy’s shade picture, infrared spectrometer, and thermal infrared spectrometer, in addition to the L’LORRI imager that snapped the pictures at high. These units will likely be put to process when Lucy arrives on the Trojan asteroid Eurybates in August 2027. Lucy remains to be very early in its mission, but it surely’s already catching glimpses of our photo voltaic system’s historical previous.
Donaldjohanson is just not the final asteroid Lucy will fly by, but it surely’s additionally not the primary. The mission flew by the small asteroid Dinkinesh in November 2023—an itsy-bitsy asteroid at simply 0.5 miles (790 meters) throughout. It marked the primary time a spacecraft had noticed a contact binary. In a photo voltaic system stuffed with poorly understood objects, and with the Trojan asteroids on the horizon, we’ve each motive to hope that Lucy can have many extra firsts in its future.
