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NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has actually recorded its very first high-resolution pictures of an asteroid, exposing a bizarrely shaped 150-million-year-old area rock.
The asteroid Donaldjohanson formed when 2 smaller sized items smashed into each other. Donaldjohanson is narrow in the center with 2 lobes on either side, like a misshapen peanut with one kernel bigger than the other.
Lucy flew as close as 600 miles (960 kilometers)– about the width of Montana– from Donaldjohanson on Sunday (April 20), recording the very first comprehensive pictures of the asteroid. Scientists hope that studying Donaldjohanson will assist clarify how our planetary system’s worlds formed.
“Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly complicated geology,” Hal Levisonthe primary detective for Lucy at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, stated in a declaration from NASA. “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.”
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The Lucy objective introduced in 2021 and is on its method to study ancient asteroids orbiting the sun in the primary asteroid belt, around 445 million miles (715 million km) from Earth. Lucy’s primary targets are the Trojan asteroids, which are billions of years of ages– far older than Donaldjohanson– and orbit in 2 groups on either side of Jupiter.
The Trojan asteroids are most likely made from the exact same ancient product that formed worlds like Jupiter, Neptune and Saturn, and therefore have the possible to supply researchers with a window into the development of our planetary system.
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Donaldjohanson is a medium-sized asteroid in the primary asteroid belt in between Mars and Jupiter, orbiting the sun from a range that varies in between around 180 million and 260 million miles (290 million and 420 million km), according to Area Reference
Scientist approximated that Donaldjohanson is around 5 miles (8 km) long and 2 miles (3.5 km) large at its largest point. That makes the peanut-shaped rock peanut-sized compared to a few of the Trojan asteroids Lucy intends to study. Lucy’s very first Trojan target, Eurybates, is approximated to be around 40 miles (64 km) large.
Donaldjohanson is a suitable stop-off for Lucy: The asteroid is called after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johansonwho found the Australopithecus fossil “Lucy” — the remains of an extinct human relative– with his college student Tom Gray in 1974. NASA called the Lucy objective after that fossil due to the fact that, in the very same method that the fossil offered insights into the development of human beings, scientists hope that this objective will accomplish the exact same for the origins of worlds.
Lucy caught the brand-new images utilizing the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, although not all of the asteroid shows up in the images since Donaldjohanson is bigger than Lucy’s field of vision. Scientists will discover more about the asteroid’s complete shape as they get more information from the spacecraft, according to the declaration.
Lucy initially evaluated its systems with a flyby of the asteroid Dinkinesh in 2023. A NASA representative explained the current encounter with Donaldjohanson as a “full dress rehearsal” ahead of the spacecraft’s see to the very first Trojan asteroid in 2027.
“These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,” Tom Statlera program researcher for the Lucy objective at NASA, stated in the declaration. “The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense.”
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