The Lucy spacecraft has captured its first images of the asteroid Donaldjohanson.
The Lucy spacecraft, launched into space in October 2021, has captured its first images of its next target—a three-kilometer-wide asteroid in the Main Belt, named 52246 Donaldjohanson. The probe is set to fly past this celestial body at a distance of 960 kilometers on April 20, 2025.
2025-02-28 10:01:33https://naked-science.ru/community/1034020
In the published NASA images taken on February 20 and 22, Donaldjohanson appeared as a small dot moving against the background stars of the constellation Sextans. At the time of the capture, Lucy was located 70 million kilometers away from Donaldjohanson.
The Lucy mission will study Trojan asteroids among other objectives in the near future. Over its 12-year mission, the spacecraft is expected to visit 11 targets.
In November 2023, the spacecraft successfully flew by one of these targets — the asteroid Dinkinesh. It turned out that the space rock has a moon, which has been named Selim.