Latest news with #LucyMission
Gizmodo
03-07-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
NASA Reveals First-Ever Full Image of Peanut-Shaped Asteroid Donaldjohanson
Scientists with NASA's Lucy mission are finally wrapping up the process of refining the data gathered by the spacecraft's April 20 encounter with Donaldjohanson, an asteroid in our solar system's main asteroid belt. And it's, uh, as peanut-shaped as we first saw it. Earlier this year, Lucy's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager snapped an image of Donaldjohansson while quickly swooping past it, at a distance of about 600 miles (960 kilometers), with the smallest visible features measuring around 130 feet (40 meters) across—an impressive close-up, considering the overall scale of anything we observe in space. Regrettably, the Sun's position behind Lucy reduced the contrast of the asteroid's smaller details. But the close visit is invaluable nevertheless, as it's allowing scientists to carefully comb over the details of its surface after adjusting for the brightness. 'Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly complicated geology,' said Hal Levison, Lucy's principal investigator, in an earlier press release about the asteroid. Donaldjohansson likely got its lumpy shape from a cosmic collision between two smaller objects around 150 million years ago. It's a relatively common shape among smaller asteroids in the solar system, so what we learn from Donaldjohanson could inform our understanding of many other cosmic objects. '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,' Levison added in the same release. Donaldjohansson is not the main objective of the Lucy mission, whose itinerary is set for the eight Trojan asteroids that share Jupiter's orbit around the Sun. Still, Lucy's Donaldjohanson encounter—and the November 2023 flyby of asteroid Dinkinesh—is an excellent 'dress rehearsal' for Lucy as it continues its journey toward the cooler, outer regions of the solar system, according to NASA's Erin Morton in a statement earlier this week. Lucy's next milestone is set to occur in August 2027, when the spacecraft will finally start to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids in earnest—starting with Eurybates, a carbonaceous asteroid so big that it has its own satellite, Queta.
Yahoo
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Learn About: NASA's Lucy Spacecraft Flyby With Asteroid Donaldjohanson
Learn more about the Lucy mission "fly past 52246 Donaldjohanson -NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Dan Gallagher: Producer/Narrator Adriana Manrique Gutierrez: Animator Kel Elkins: Animator Johathan North: Animator Michael Lentz: Animator/Art Director Walt Feimer: Animation Lead Nancy Jones: Public Affairs Katherine Kretke: Public Affairs Universal Production Music: 'Nico's Journey' by Nicholas Smith [PRS]; 'Knowing Half the Future' and 'Temporal Timings' by Lee John Gretton [PRS]; 'Poly Propulsion' by Alfie Solo [PRS]
India Today
22-04-2025
- Science
- India Today
Lucy sends first pictures of 150 million-year-old asteroid Donaldjohanson
On its way to the Trojan asteroids, Nasa's Lucy spacecraft has captured an odd-looking asteroid that resembles an ice cream images that arrived on Earth were taken during a close flyby of the asteroid as Lucy flew approximately 960 km from the asteroid Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025. The asteroid formed about 150 million years said that the asteroid was previously observed to have large brightness variations over a 10-day period, so some of Lucy team members' expectations were confirmed when the first images showed what appeared to be an elongated contact binary, an object formed when two smaller bodies #LucyMission took a look at asteroid Donaldjohanson, its second asteroid encounter on its journey to Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. The first images reveal a unique fragment of an asteroid that formed about 150 million years ago! Find out more: NASA (@NASA) April 21, 2025advertisement '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,' Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy team was surprised by the odd shape of the narrow neck connecting the two lobes, which looked like two nested ice cream reveal that the asteroid is larger than originally estimated at about 8 km long and 3.5 kilometres added that in this first set of high-resolution images returned from the spacecraft, the full asteroid is not visible as the asteroid is larger than the imager's field of view. It will take up to a week for the team to downlink the remainder of the encounter data from the is not a primary science target of the Lucy mission. As planned, the Dinkinesh flyby was a system test for the mission. At the same time, this encounter was a full dress rehearsal, in which the team conducted a series of dense observations to maximize data Lucy spacecraft will spend most of the remainder of 2025 travelling through the main asteroid belt. Lucy will encounter the mission's first main target, the Jupiter Trojan asteroid Eurybates, in August 2027
