In the present day within the historical past of astronomy, the Lucy mission flies by a surprisingly formed asteroid.
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 April 20, 2025, coming inside 600 miles (920 kilometers) of the thing positioned within the inside 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 sort of hominid. They named the specimen “Lucy,” which is what the mission is called after. Like their namesakes, the mission and this asteroid may assist us perceive extra about our origins.
The day after the encounter, NASA launched pictures of Donaldjohanson taken by the Lucy LOng Vary Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRII), the craft’s high-resolution digicam. They revealed 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 pictures additionally revealed Donaldjohanson’s attention-grabbing peanut form, with two lobes related by a slender neck. It seems to be an elongated contact binary, which happens when an asteroid is fashioned by two objects coming collectively. Nevertheless it could possibly be extra sophisticated than that, as scientists had been shocked by the form of the neck, which resembles two nested ice cream cones, in accordance with a NASA information launch. “Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly sophisticated geology,” stated Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy at Southwest Analysis Institute, within the launch.
