The geological options of an oddly formed asteroid visited by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft now have official names, and just like the mission’s moniker, they mirror a concentrate on early human family.
Lucy flew by the asteroid, dubbed 52246 Donaldjohanson, on April 20, and the names of the spacecraft and asteroid have been removed from coincidental. The asteroid is known as after Donald Johanson, the American paleoanthropologist who found “Lucy,” a now-famous partial skeleton of the hominin Australopithecus afarensis that impressed the Lucy mission‘s title. Lucy the hominin acquired her title from the 1967 Beatles track “Lucy within the Sky with Diamonds,” which Johanson heard in the camp on the evening he found elements of the three.18 million-year-old skeleton in 1974.
Now, scientists have named the options of asteroid Donaldjohanson, and the names have been permitted by the Worldwide Astronomical Union, the official arbitrator of names in astronomy.
Associated: See asteroid Donaldjohanson up close thanks to NASA’s Lucy mission
The asteroid’s two lobes have been named after geographical regions related to hominin discoveries. The smaller lobe is called Afar, after the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia, where the Lucy skeleton was found. The larger lobe is named after Olduvai, a significant river gorge in Tanzania where many other hominin fossils have been discovered.
The asteroid’s neck, or “collum,” — which joins the two lobes — has been named Windover. The name comes from the Windover Archaeological Site, which is near Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where the Lucy spacecraft launched in 2021.
“Human remains and artifacts recovered from that site revolutionized our understanding of the people who lived in Florida around 7,300 years ago,” NASA officials said in a statement.
Additionally on the asteroid’s neck are two clean areas. One such “regio” is known as Hadar, after the location the place the Lucy fossil was discovered. The opposite space is known as Minatogawa, after the Okinawa area the place Japan’s oldest identified hominins have been found.
In addition, notable fossil names have been assigned to “select boulders and craters on Donaldjohanson,” NASA officials said in the statement.
These names appear to be Boxgrove Saxum, Cashel Saxum, Kennewick Saxum, Luzia Dorsum, Mungo (a crater) and Narmada (another crater), according to the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, a service from the U.S. Geological Survey that posted the entire IAU-approved names so far for Donaldjohanson. (In Latin, “dorsum” means one thing like “the ridge,” and “saxum” interprets to “a big stone” or “boulder.”)
The Lucy spacecraft swung by asteroid Donaldjohanson to apply for its essential mission: to make use of its science devices to probe house rocks often called Trojans. Trojan asteroids share Jupiter‘s orbit and are named after the traditional metropolis of Troy.
The goals of the Donaldjohanson flyby included taking photos of options on the asteroid, which is positioned between Mars and Jupiter within the asteroid belt. As of Sept. 9, the Lucy spacecraft was roughly 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) from the solar, according to NASA. It’s en path to its subsequent encounter with the Trojan asteroid Eurybates (which takes its title from Homer’s work), which is anticipated in August 2027.
