NASA has released new images of a peculiarly shaped space object with an equally offbeat name, in high-resolution photos that reveal a full-frame view of the asteroid Donaldjohanson.
The images, obtained by NASA’s Lucy mission, represent the ongoing analysis of the spacecraft’s close encounter with the object earlier this year.
Obtained using Lucy’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI), the newly released images reveal Donaldjohanson’s appearance within just minutes of the spacecraft’s closest approach to the asteroid, which occurred on April 20, 2025.
The flyby served as a crucial opportunity for training in advance of Lucy’s future missions to explore the Jupiter Trojan asteroids.
Additional images obtained in April provided a more detailed view of the asteroid as it passed within just 600 miles of the contact binary object, revealing its cratered surface and peculiar outer lobes, which are conjoined by a narrow central region.
Preliminary imagery dispatched to Earth from Lucy’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) revealed an elongated, contact binary asteroid resembling what some scientists have likened to a barbell or a pair of ice cream cones joined at the tips. One of the asteroid’s lobes is noticeably smaller than the other, although both possess similar circumferences.
In animations featuring sequential images obtained by Lucy in April, Donaldjohanson can be seen rotating, although this was largely a parallax effect introduced by the NASA spacecraft’s own motion in relation to the oddly-shaped space rock.
Tom Statler, Lucy program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said at the time that the early images of Donaldjohanson Lucy obtained “are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery.”
Lucy’s encounter with Donaldjohanson followed its earlier test flyby of asteroid Dinkinesh, which the NASA mission team used to validate the spacecraft’s systems. This latest flyby enabled the team to conduct more detailed observational campaigns, helping them refine their data collection techniques.
Donaldjohanson is not the first unusually shaped asteroid to cross paths with a NASA spacecraft. The Kuiper Belt Object 486958, known as Arrokoth, also features a distinctive double-lobed form, which bears a resemblance to the newly captured images of Donaldjohanson.
NASA says that Lucy is currently coasting through “a relatively quiet cruise period as it continues traveling through the main asteroid belt.”
“Lucy is heading away from the Sun at more than 30,000 mph (50,000 km per hour), and the team will keep monitoring the spacecraft as it moves toward the cooler and dimmer outer solar system,” Erin Morton wrote in an update that appeared on NASA’s official Lucy blog on July 2, 2025.
In the future, as it nears its primary mission, the spacecraft will begin its approach of the Trojan asteroids, where it will conduct a total of four encounters that will enable it to make detailed observations of six or more asteroids. Two of these space objects were discovered by the Lucy team and will be explored by the spacecraft over a period of around 15 months.
Lucy’s first encounter as it approaches Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids will be its flyby of the asteroid Eurybates, which NASA says will occur in August 2027.
Additional information on NASA’s Lucy mission can be found on the U.S. space agency’s website.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.