A Nasa spacecraft has captured its first detailed images of an unexplored asteroid, revealing a bizarrely shaped 150-million-year-old space rock.
The asteroid Donaldjohanson, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has an unusual peanut-like shape with a narrow “neck” connecting two lobes.
Scientists estimate it measures approximately five miles long and two miles wide at its widest point.
Lucy flew as close as 600 miles from Donaldjohanson on Sunday, April 20, capturing the first high-resolution images of the asteroid.
Nasa’s Lucy spaceship caught an image of the asteroid
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Principal investigator for Lucy at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, Hal Levison, 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.”
Nasa acknowledged that the unusual “neck” connecting the two main parts was unexpected.
Researchers believe the asteroid formed when two smaller objects collided with each other, creating its distinctive elongated contact binary shape.
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NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, with its high gain antenna attached, is on a rotation stand inside the Astrotech Space Operations Facility in Titusville, Florida
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The object is part of Lucy’s journey to study ancient asteroids that could provide insights into how our solar system formed. Though Donaldjohanson is 150 million years old, it’s relatively young compared to the billions-year-old Trojan asteroids that are Lucy’s main targets.
The Lucy mission, launched in 2021, is primarily focused on studying Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, which orbit in two groups on either side of the gas giant.
These ancient space rocks are believed to contain material from the early solar system.
Tom Statler, a program scientist for the Lucy mission at NASA, added: “These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery. The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense.”
Lucy captured the new images using its Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI), though not all of the asteroid is visible because Donaldjohanson is larger than the camera’s field of view.
Sending all the data from this flyby will take about a week, according to NASA.
The spacecraft is also equipped with other scientific instruments, including colour imagers and infrared spectrometers, with this data to be retrieved and analysed over the coming weeks.
This recent flyby is considered a “full dress rehearsal” for Lucy’s main mission, with the spacecraft set to spend the rest of 2025 travelling through the main asteroid belt.
In August 2027, Lucy will reach its first primary target, the Trojan asteroid Eurybates, which is estimated to be around 40 miles wide.
