Lucy shares breathtaking images from close encounter with asteroid Donald Johansson

The asteroid called Donald Johansson was captured by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during a flyby on April 20, 2025. On the closest approach, the spacecraft was at a distance of 960 km (600 miles).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyoezs04rhc

Donald Johansson is a carbonaceous asteroid located in the inner region of the main asteroid belt.

It was discovered by American astronomer Shertebas at the Siding Spring Observatory on March 2, 1981.

Donald Johansson had previously observed a large brightness variation over a 10-day period, so some of the expectations of members of the Lucy team were confirmed when the first image showed what appeared to be an elongated contact binary.

However, researchers were surprised by the strange shape of the narrow neck that connects the two leaves.

“The asteroid Donald Johansson has an incredibly complex geology,” says Dr. Hallevison, principal investigator at Lucy, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute.

“A detailed study of complex structures reveals important information about the building blocks and collision processes that formed planets in the solar system.”

From a preliminary analysis of the first available images collected by the spacecraft L’Lorri Imager, Donaldjohanson appears to be larger than originally estimated.

“In this first set of high-resolution images returned from the spacecraft, we cannot see a perfect asteroid because the asteroid is larger than the imager’s field of view,” the scientists explained.

“It takes up to a week for the team to downlink the rest of the encounter data from the spacecraft. This dataset provides a more complete image of the overall shape of the asteroid.”

“The NASA Headquarters researcher, Dr. Tom Staller, a scientist with the Lucy Program,” said:

“When Lucy reaches the Trojan asteroid, the chances that she may truly open a new window into the history of our solar system are immeasurable.”

Lucy’s first asteroid flyby target, Dinkinesch and Donald Johansson, are not the main science targets of the mission.

As planned, Dinkinesh Flyby was testing the mission’s system, but the encounter was a full dress rehearsal, with the team conducting a series of close observations to maximize data collection.

Data collected by Lucy’s other scientific instruments, the L’Ralph Color Imager and infrared spectrometers and L’TES thermal infrared spectrometers, will be acquired and analyzed over the next few weeks.

Lucy spacecraft will spend most of the rest of 2025 traveling through the main asteroid belt.

Lucy will encounter the mission’s first major target, the Jupiter Trojan Novel, in August 2027.