NASA’s Lucy spacecraft just pulled off its second asteroid flyby and imaged a frankly tasty-looking rock: a peanut-shaped asteroid named Donaldjohanson.
The oblong asteroid is a fragment of a long-destroyed space rock that formed roughly 150 million years ago, and Lucy swooped within 600 miles (960 kilometers) of it on April 20, 2025, capturing some seriously wild close-ups.
“These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,” said Tom Statler, NASA program scientist for the Lucy mission, in an agency release. “The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense.”
Donaldjohanson—named for the anthropologist who discovered the fossilized hominid Lucy back in 1974, which gives the spacecraft its name—is relatively small, at roughly 5 miles (8 km) across. But that’s larger than earlier estimates; just a few months ago, when Lucy was farther away, researchers estimated that Donaldjohanson was about 3 miles (4 km) across.
Below you can see the asteroid as it appeared 45 million miles (70 million kilometers) from the spacecraft. Suffice to say, the new images give us a better view of the ancient rock.
Lucy got a sneak peek of the main belt asteroid back in February, as the spacecraft prepares to explore the Trojan asteroids as far out as Jupiter. Donaldjohanson isn’t a Trojan asteroid, but it was conveniently positioned for NASA’s Lucy spacecraft to swing by on a scenic detour en route to its main destination.
The flyby gave NASA researchers an opportunity to test Lucy’s color image, infrared spectrometer, and thermal infrared spectrometer, as well as the L’LORRI imager that snapped the images at top. Those devices will be put to task when Lucy arrives at the Trojan asteroid Eurybates in August 2027. Lucy is still very early in its mission, but it’s already catching glimpses of our solar system’s ancient past.
Donaldjohanson is not the last asteroid Lucy will fly by, but it’s also not the first. The mission flew by the small asteroid Dinkinesh in November 2023—an itsy-bitsy asteroid at just 0.5 miles (790 meters) across. It marked the first time a spacecraft had observed a contact binary. In a solar system filled with poorly understood objects, and with the Trojan asteroids on the horizon, we have every reason to hope that Lucy will have many more firsts in its future.
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