Peanut-shaped shock for Lucy in asteroid flyby

Asteroid Donaldjohanson was the second vacation spot on the NASA mission’s itinerary — and its dimension and form weren’t what scientists anticipated.

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson in a video on April 20. Utilizing the Lucy LOng Vary Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRII), it imaged the asteroid each two seconds in a time-lapse spanning vantage factors from a distance of 1,000 to 660 miles (1,600 to 1,100 km). Credit score: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft visited the asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson on Sunday, April 20, coming inside 600 miles (920 kilometers) of the article situated within the internal area of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

The asteroid was named after the paleontologist Donald Johanson, who in 1974 co-discovered the primary recognized instance of beforehand unknown kind of hominid. They named the specimen “Lucy,” which is what the mission is called after. Like their namesakes, the mission and this asteroid might assist us perceive extra about our origins.

The day after the encoutner, NASA launched photographs of Donaldjohanson taken by the Lucy LOng Vary Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRII), the craft’s high-resolution digicam. They revealed that that the asteroid is 5 miles (8 km) lengthy — greater than scientists anticipated — and a pair of miles (3.5 km) at its widest level.

The photographs additionally revealed Donaldjohanson’s fascinating peanut form, with two lobes linked by a slender neck. Its look resembles an elongated contact binary, which is when an asteroid is fashioned by two objects coming collectively. Nevertheless it might be extra difficult than that, as scientists had been stunned by the form of the neck, which resembes two nested ice cream cones, in line with a NASA information launch. “Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly difficult geology,” mentioned Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy at Southwest Analysis Institute, within the launch.

Info from Lucy’s different devices will likely be downloaded from the craft and processed inside the subsequent couple of weeks. This can embrace shade photographs and infrared spectra that would yield clues to Donaldjohanson’s floor composition, particle dimension, and degree of radiation.

The Lucy mission will spend the subsequent two years touring by the asteroid belt, arriving at its subsequent goal Aug. 12, 2027: the asteroid 3548 Eurybates and its satellite tv for pc, Queta. Eurybates and the remainder of Lucy’s future targets are Trojan asteroids, a household of asteroids gravitationally linked with Jupiter. Throughout this leg of the mission, Lucy will encounter a complete of 5 Trojans and three satellite tv for pc objects. It is going to finish its mission after flying by asteroid 617 Patroclus and its satellite tv for pc Menoetius on March 3, 2033. 

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