NASA‘s Lucy spacecraft has just made its second flyby of an asteroid and photographed a frankly appetizing-looking rock: a peanut-shaped asteroid named Donald Johanson.
The oblong asteroid is a fragment of a long-destroyed space rock that was formed about 150 million years ago. On April 20, 2025, Lucy flew within 600 miles (960 kilometers) of it, capturing some truly wild close-ups.
“These early images from Donald Johanson once again demonstrate the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,” said Tom Statler, NASA’s Lucy mission scientist, in a press release. “The potential to truly open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy reaches the Trojan asteroids is enormous.”
Donald Johansson – named after the anthropologist who discovered the fossilized hominid Lucy in 1974, giving the spacecraft its name – is relatively small, about 5 miles (8 km) across. But this is larger than previous estimates; only a few months ago, when Lucy was even further away, researchers estimated that Donald Johanson 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 it to say, the new images give us a better idea of the ancient rock.
Lucy was able to photograph the main-belt asteroid back in February, when the spacecraft was preparing to explore the Trojan asteroids all the way to Jupiter. Donald Johanson is not a Trojan asteroid, but it was conveniently located for NASA’s Lucy spacecraft to fly by on a scenic detour on its way to its main destination.
This flyby gave NASA researchers the opportunity to test Lucy’s color imaging, infrared spectrometer and thermal infrared spectrometer, as well as the L’LORRI thermal imager that took images from above. These instruments will be deployed when Lucy arrives at the Trojan asteroid Eurybates in August 2027. Lucy is still at the beginning of its mission, but it is already catching glimpses of our solar system’s ancient past.
Donald Johanson is not the last asteroid that Lucy will fly by, but it is not the first either. In November 2023, the mission flew past the small asteroid Dinkinesh, a tiny asteroid measuring only 0.5 miles (790 meters) across. It was the first time a spacecraft had ever observed a contact double. 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 make many more firsts in the future.
