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2w ago

NASA’s Lucy Returns First Images from Donaldjohanson Flyby

The spacecraft completed its second asteroid encounter, revealing the striking geology of a contact binary fragment formed 150 million years ago.

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An artist's conception of the Lucy spacecraft inspecting a Trojan asteroid.
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Lucy sends first pictures of 150 million-year-old asteroid Donaldjohanson

Overview

  • NASA’s Lucy spacecraft successfully flew within 600 miles of asteroid Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025, as part of a dress rehearsal for its primary mission to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids.
  • Initial images reveal Donaldjohanson as a contact binary asteroid with a unique narrow neck connecting two lobes, resembling nested ice cream cones.
  • The asteroid, larger than previously estimated, measures about 5 miles long and 2 miles wide and is believed to have formed from a collision 150 million years ago.
  • Lucy’s instruments, including the L’LORRI imager, L’Ralph color and infrared imager, and L’TES spectrometer, collected data during the flyby, with full datasets expected to be downlinked over the next week.
  • This encounter builds on Lucy’s 2023 flyby of asteroid Dinkinesh and its moon, Selam, as the spacecraft continues its 12-year mission to study the origins of the solar system.