Asteroid Donaldjohanson. Credit NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft got a close-up view of a peanut-shaped asteroid that likely formed around 150 million years ago.
On April 20, 2025, Lucy flew about 600 miles (960 kilometers) from the asteroid called Donaldjohanson and started sending back images from the flyby. This was Lucy’s second encounter with an asteroid.
The images were taken by Lucy’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI). The timelapse shows pictures taken every 2 seconds starting at 1:50 p.m. EDT (17:50 UTC) on April 20. While the asteroid seems to spin quickly in the video, it actually rotates slowly. The fast movement is caused by the spacecraft flying past it at high speed.
The images were taken when Lucy was between 1,000 and 660 miles (1,600 to 1,100 kilometers) away—about 40 seconds before its closest approach of 600 miles (960 kilometers).
Asteroid Donaldjohanson. Credit NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL
Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy at Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, said:
“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.”
Credit NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL
source NASA
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