NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft captures stunning images of asteroids, shaped like two ice cream cones, providing new insights into the early formation of our solar system.
On April 20, the spacecraft flew about 600 miles from the asteroid Donaldjohanson, revealing an unexpected formation that even surprised senior space scientists. Donaldjohanson is not the typical potato-like shape of many small celestial bodies, but a binary that contacts binary (two objects that both collide and fuse together) and is a connection area with an abnormal configuration.
“The geology of the asteroid Donaldjohanson is very complex,” said Hal Levison, principal investigator at the Southwest Institute of Boulder, Colorado. “As we look at complex structures in detail, they will reveal important information about the building blocks and collision processes that form planets in the solar system.”
The initial high-resolution image shows that Donaldjohanson is larger than the initially estimated scientists, with a length of about 5 miles and a maximum point wide. The complete structure of the asteroid is not immediately visible because it exceeds the field of view of Lucy’s long-range reconnaissance imager (L’Lorri).
Named after the famous fossil of 3.2 million human ancestors, Lucy, is studying a 12-year journey of multiple asteroids, focusing mainly on the Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit. These ancient space rocks are believed to be primitive residues of the early solar system, and have the potential to grasp clues about planetary formation.
Donaldjohanson itself, named after one of the discoverers of Lucy’s fossils, is a relatively young asteroid about 150 million years old. It is known from Earth-based observations that the slow rotation of the asteroids detected significant brightness changes in 10 days, but the special shape of their connecting areas is surprising.
This encounter is the key dress rehearsal for Lucy’s main mission. The spacecraft has intensive observations to maximize its scientific instrumentation suite. In addition to the L’Lorri camera, Lucy also carries a color imager, an infrared spectrometer and a thermal infrared spectrometer, which is expected to be analyzed in the coming weeks.
“These early images of these early Donaldjohansons show once again the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as a discovery engine,” said Tom Statler, a planning scientist for the Lucy mission at NASA headquarters in Washington. “When Lucy arrives at the Trojan asteroid, the potential for a new window that really opens a new window is huge.”
The spacecraft will be spent most of 2025, passing through the major asteroid belt before reaching its first major target, the Trojan asteroid Eurybates, in August 2027. At that time, scientists hoped that the lessons learned from studying Donaldjohanson’s anomaly structure would help them better understand the various shapes and compositions within these ancient weather bodies.
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