Lucy sends first pictures of 150 million-year-old asteroid Donaldjohanson
On its way to the Trojan asteroids, Nasa's Lucy spacecraft has captured an odd-looking asteroid that resembles an ice cream cone.The images that arrived on Earth were taken during a close flyby of the asteroid as Lucy flew approximately 960 km from the asteroid Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025. The asteroid formed about 150 million years ago.Nasa said that the asteroid was previously observed to have large brightness variations over a 10-day period, so some of Lucy team members' expectations were confirmed when the first images showed what appeared to be an elongated contact binary, an object formed when two smaller bodies collide.Our #LucyMission took a look at asteroid Donaldjohanson, its second asteroid encounter on its journey to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. The first images reveal a unique fragment of an asteroid that formed about 150 million years ago! Find out more: https://t.co/Bgg5CkQfYd pic.twitter.com/lgZRG8Qngh— NASA (@NASA) April 21, 2025advertisement
'Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly complicated geology. As we study the complex structures in detail, they will reveal important information about the building blocks and collisional processes that formed the planets in our Solar System,' Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy said.The team was surprised by the odd shape of the narrow neck connecting the two lobes, which looked like two nested ice cream cones.Images reveal that the asteroid is larger than originally estimated at about 8 km long and 3.5 kilometres wide.Nasa added that in this first set of high-resolution images returned from the spacecraft, the full asteroid is not visible as the asteroid is larger than the imager's field of view. It will take up to a week for the team to downlink the remainder of the encounter data from the spacecraft.advertisementDonaldjohanson is not a primary science target of the Lucy mission. As planned, the Dinkinesh flyby was a system test for the mission. At the same time, this encounter was a full dress rehearsal, in which the team conducted a series of dense observations to maximize data collection.The Lucy spacecraft will spend most of the remainder of 2025 travelling through the main asteroid belt. Lucy will encounter the mission's first main target, the Jupiter Trojan asteroid Eurybates, in August 2027
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Did you know?
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