In its 2nd asteroid come upon, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft received an in depth have a look at a uniquely formed fragment of an asteroid that shaped about 150 million years in the past. The spacecraft has begun returning photographs that have been accrued because it flew roughly 600 miles (960 km) from the asteroid Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025.
The asteroid used to be prior to now seen to have massive brightness permutations over a 10-day duration, so a few of Lucy workforce contributors’ expectancies have been showed when the primary photographs confirmed what seemed to be an elongated touch binary (an object shaped when two smaller our bodies collide). On the other hand, the workforce used to be stunned by way of the atypical form of the slim neck connecting the 2 lobes, which looks as if two nested ice cream cones.
“Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly sophisticated geology,” says Hal Levison, most important investigator for Lucy at Southwest Analysis Institute, Boulder, Colorado. “As we find out about the advanced constructions intimately, they’ll expose vital details about the construction blocks and collisional processes that shaped the planets in our Sun Gadget.”
From a initial research of the primary to be had photographs accrued by way of the spacecraft’s L’LORRI imager, the asteroid seems to be higher than initially estimated, about 5 miles (8 km) lengthy and a couple of miles (3.5 km) vast on the widest level. On this first set of high-resolution photographs returned from the spacecraft, the whole asteroid isn’t visual because the asteroid is greater than the imager’s box of view. It’s going to take as much as per week for the workforce to downlink the rest of the come upon information from the spacecraft; this dataset will give a extra whole image of the asteroid’s general form.
Like Lucy’s first asteroid flyby goal, Dinkinesh, Donaldjohanson isn’t a number one science goal of the Lucy undertaking. As deliberate, the Dinkinesh flyby used to be a gadget’s take a look at for the undertaking, whilst this come upon used to be a complete get dressed practice session, by which the workforce carried out a sequence of dense observations to maximise information assortment. Information accrued by way of Lucy’s different medical tools, the L’Ralph colour imager and infrared spectrometer and the L’TES thermal infrared spectrometer, can be retrieved and analyzed over the following couple of weeks.
The Lucy spacecraft will spend many of the rest of 2025 travelling thru the primary asteroid belt. Lucy will come upon the undertaking’s first primary goal, the Jupiter Trojan asteroid Eurybates, in August 2027.
“Those early photographs of Donaldjohanson are once more appearing the super functions of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,” mentioned Tom Statler, program scientist for the Lucy undertaking at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The possible to actually open a brand new window into the historical past of our sun gadget when Lucy will get to the Trojan asteroids is immense.”
NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle in Greenbelt, Maryland, supplies general undertaking control, programs engineering and the protection and undertaking assurance for Lucy, in addition to the designing and construction the L’Ralph software. Hal Levison of the Boulder, Colorado, administrative center of SwRI is the most important investigator. SwRI is headquartered in San Antonio and in addition leads the undertaking’s science workforce, science remark making plans, and information processing. NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle in Greenbelt, Maryland, supplies general undertaking control, programs engineering, and the protection and undertaking assurance for Lucy, in addition to the L’Ralph software. Lockheed Martin House in Littleton, Colorado, constructed the spacecraft, designed the orbital trajectory, and offers flight operations. Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are liable for navigating the Lucy spacecraft. The Johns Hopkins Implemented Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed and constructed the L’LORRI (Lucy Lengthy Vary Reconnaissance Imager) software. Arizona State College designed and constructed the L’TES (Lucy Thermal Emission Spectrometer). Lucy is the 13th undertaking in NASA’s Discovery Program, which is controlled by way of NASA’s Marshall House Flight Middle in Huntsville, Alabama.
By means of Katherine Kretke
Southwest Analysis Institute
Media Touch:
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Nancy N. Jones
NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle, Greenbelt, Md.
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