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NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will zip the little asteroid Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025.
By blinking in between images recorded by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft on February 20 and 22, 2025, this animation reveals the viewed movement of Donaldjohanson relative to the background stars as the spacecraft quickly approaches the asteroid. Image credit: NASA/ Goddard/ SwRI/ Johns Hopkins APL.
Donaldjohanson is a carbonaceous asteroid around 4 km(2.5 miles )in size.
Found on March 2, 1981 by the American astronomer Schelte Bus at the Siding Spring Observatory, it orbits within the inner areas of the primary asteroid belt.
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will pass within 960 km (596 miles) of Donaldjohanson on April 20.
“This 2nd asteroid encounter for Lucy will act as a dress-rehearsal for the spacecraft’s primary targets, the never-before-explored Jupiter Trojan asteroids,” members of the Lucy group stated in a declaration.
“The spacecraft currently effectively observed the main-belt asteroid Dinkinesh and its moon, Selam, in November 2023.”
These brand-new images caught by the Lucy LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) instrument.
This illustration reveals NASA’s Lucy spacecraft passing among the Trojan asteroids near Jupiter. Image credit: Southwest Research Institute.
“From a range of 70 million km (45 million miles ), Donaldjohanson is still dim, though it sticks out plainly in this field of reasonably faint stars in the constellation of Sextans,” the scientists stated.
“Celestial north is to the right of the frame, and the 0.11-degree field of vision would represent 85,500 miles (140,000 km) at the range of the asteroid.”
“In the very first of the 2 images, another dim asteroid can be seen photobombing in the lower best quadrant of the image.”
“However, simply as the headlights of an approaching automobile frequently appear reasonably fixed, Donaldjohanson’s obvious movement in between these 2 images is much smaller sized than that of this trespasser, which has actually vacated the field of vision in the 2nd image.”
According to the researchers, Donaldjohanson is called for the anthropologist Donald Johanson, who found ‘Lucy’– a 3.18-million-year-old specimen of Australopithecus afarensis. The Lucy objective is called for the fossil.
“Lucy will continue to image Donaldjohanson over the next 2 months as part of its optical navigation program, which utilizes the asteroid’s evident position versus the star background to make sure a precise flyby,” they stated.
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