NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has captured its first high-resolution images of the 150-million-year-old asteroid Donaldjohanson, a peanut-shaped rock that could shed light on how planets formed in our solar system. The images show Donaldjohanson with two lobes on either side and one kernel larger than the other.
The asteroid is about 5 miles long and 2 miles wide at its widest point, making it significantly smaller than some of the Trojan asteroids Lucy aims to study. Researchers hope that studying Donaldjohanson will help them understand how planets formed in our solar system.
Lucy flew as close as 600 miles from Donaldjohanson on April 20, capturing the first detailed images of the asteroid. The spacecraft’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager was used to take the images, which show a complex geology that could reveal important information about the formation of planets.
“This is a tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,” said Tom Statler, a program scientist for the Lucy mission at NASA. “The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense.”
The Lucy mission launched in 2021 and is on its way to study ancient asteroids orbiting the sun in the main asteroid belt. The spacecraft’s main targets are the Trojan asteroids, which are billions of years old and have the potential to provide scientists with a window into the formation of our solar system.
Donaldjohanson was named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, who discovered the Australopithecus fossil “Lucy” in 1974. The asteroid is located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, orbiting the sun from a distance that ranges between 180 million and 260 million miles.
The images of Donaldjohanson are the first close-up images of an asteroid taken by Lucy, which will help researchers learn more about the asteroid’s full shape as they receive more data from the spacecraft.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/nasas-lucy-spacecraft-snaps-first-close-ups-of-weird-peanut-shaped-asteroid