NASA Lucy captures a stunning view of the peanut-shaped asteroid in the latest Let’s

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft just removed its second asteroid Flyby and depicted a frankly delicious looking rock: a peanut-shaped asteroid named Donaldjohanson.

The prolonged asteroid is a fragment of a long -lasting space rock that formed about 150 million years ago, and Lucy threw itself within 600 miles (960 kilometers) of it on April 20, 2025, capturing some seriously wild plans.

“These early images of Donaldjohanson again show the huge capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as the engine of the opening,” says Tom Statler, a scientist under the NASA program for Lucy’s mission, at an agency releaseS “The potential to really open a new window in the history of our solar system when Lucy reaches the Trojan asteroids is huge.”

Donaldjohanson – called the anthropologist who discovered the fossil Hominid Lucy in 1974, which gave the name of the spacecraft – is relatively small, about 5 miles (8 km). But this is more than the worse estimates; Just a few months ago, when Lucy was further, the researchers thought Donaldjohanson was about 3 miles (4 km).

Below you can see the asteroid as it appeared 45 million miles (70 million kilometers) from the spacecraft. Suffice it to say that the new images give us a better look at the ancient rock.

Lucy received a sneaky look at the basic asteroid on the belt Back in FebruaryAs the spacecraft prepares to explore the Trojan asteroids all the way to Jupiter. Donaldjohanson is not a Trojan asteroid, but it was conveniently positioned for NASA’s Lucy spacecraft to swing on a picturesque circumvention on its way to its main destination.

Flyby enabled NASA researchers to test the color image of Lucy, the infrared spectrometer and the thermal infrared spectrometer, as well as the image of L’Lorri, which clicked the images from above. These devices will be tasked when Lucy arrives at the Trojan asteroid Euribasz in August 2027. Lucy is still very early in her mission, but he has already gaited from the ancient past of our solar system.

Donaldjohanson is not the last asteroid that Lucy will fly, but also not the first. The mission flies from the small asteroid Dinkinesh In November 2023, an asteroid of its domestic bits only 0.5 miles (790 meters) through. He noted the first time a spacecraft 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 first in his future.