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An asteroid called Donaldjohanson was caught by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft throughout a flyby on April 20, 2025. At closest method, the spacecraft came within a range of 960 km (600 miles).
Donaldjohanson is a carbonaceous asteroid situated in the inner areas of the primary asteroid belt.
It was very first found on March 2, 1981 by the American astronomer Schelte Bus at the Siding Spring Observatory.
Donaldjohanson was formerly observed to have big brightness variations over a 10-day duration, so a few of Lucy staff member’ expectations were validated when the very first images revealed what seemed an extended contact binary– an item formed when 2 smaller sized bodies clash.
The scientists were shocked by the odd shape of the narrow neck linking the 2 lobes, which looks like 2 embedded ice cream cones.
“Asteroid Donaldjohanson has actually noticeably made complex geology,” stated Lucy primary private investigator Dr. Hal Levison, a scientist at Southwest Research Institute.
“As we study the intricate structures in information, they will expose essential info about the foundation and collisional procedures that formed the worlds in our Solar System.”
This picture of the asteroid Donaldjohanson was caught by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager(L’LORRI) on April 20, 2025, near closest technique, from a variety of 1,100 km (660 miles ). Image credit: NASA/ Goddard/ SwRI/ Johns Hopkins APL/ NOIRLab.
From an initial analysis of the very first readily available images gathered by the spacecraft’s L’LORRI imager, Donaldjohanson seems bigger than initially approximated– about 8 km (5 miles) long and 3.5 km (2 miles) large at the largest point.
“In this very first set of high-resolution images returned from the spacecraft, the complete asteroid is not noticeable as the asteroid is bigger than the imager’s field of vision,” the researchers described.
“It will use up to a week for the group to downlink the rest of the encounter information from the spacecraft; this dataset will offer a more total image of the asteroid’s general shape.”
“These early pictures of Donaldjohanson are once again revealing the incredible abilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,” stated Lucy program researcher Dr. Tom Statler, a scientist at NASA Headquarters.
“The prospective to actually open a brand-new window into the history of our Solar System when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is enormous.”
Like Lucy’s very first asteroid flyby target, Dinkinesh, Donaldjohanson is not a main science target of the objective.
As prepared, the Dinkinesh flyby was a system’s test for the objective, while this encounter was a complete gown wedding rehearsal, in which the group performed a series of thick observations to optimize information collection.
Information gathered by Lucy’s other clinical instruments, the L’Ralph color imager and infrared spectrometer and the L’TES thermal infrared spectrometer, will be obtained and examined over the next couple of weeks.
The Lucy spacecraft will invest the majority of the rest of 2025 taking a trip through the primary asteroid belt.
Lucy will experience the objective’s very first primary target, the Jupiter Trojan asteroid Eurybates, in August 2027.
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