Skip to main content

Next month NASA's Lucy probe will visit an asteroid that's been waiting 150 million years to say hello

 

From - Space.com

By -   

Edited by - Amal Udawatta

A spacecraft with two round solar panel wings on either side of it. In the background, there are two asteroids. The one on the right is bigger than the one on the left.
An artist's depiction of the Lucy spacecraft flying past a pair of Trojan asteroids. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)
"These relics are effectively fossils of the planet formation process, holding vital clues to deciphering the history of our solar system."

The next stop for NASA's asteroid-hopping spacecraft Lucy is a space rock named Donaldjohanson, an object researchers recently learned is about 150 million years old.

Lucy will fly past the three-mile-wide (five-kilometer-wide) asteroid on April 20, but the trip mostly serves as a rehearsal for other asteroid encounters down the road — namely, Lucy's final destination: Jupiter's Trojan asteroids. Over a 12-year mission, Lucy is scheduled to visit a total of 11 asteroids across two swarms that are leading and trailing Jupiter.

Still, every asteroid counts for this mission, and a new paper from researchers at the Southwest Research Institute branch in Boulder, Colorado suggests Donaldjohanson may hold a few welcome surprises. It's particularly likely considering how the last asteroid Lucy flew by, Dinkinesh, had a few treats of its own.

0 of 1 minute, 3 secondsVolume 0%
 
PLAY SOUND

"Based on ground-based observations, Donaldjohanson appears to be a peculiar object," Simone Marchi, Lucy's deputy principal investigator at Southwest Research Institute and lead author of the new paper, said in a statement.

    Marchi and his fellow researchers used computer modeling to figure out that the asteroid was formed roughly 150 million years ago as the result of another, larger asteroid breaking apart. In the time since, the team also learned, Donaldjohanson's orbit and spin have evolved significantly.

    "Data indicates that it could be quite elongated and a slow rotator, possibly due to thermal torques that have slowed its spin over time," David Vokrouhlický, a professor at the Charles University, Prague, and co-author of the research, said in the same statement.

    During next month's flyby, Lucy will collect data on the asteroid's shape, surface geology and cratering history. The data Lucy will gather from Donaldjohanson is especially important because that information is only accessible from a close proximity.

    Visualizations of different asteroids comparing size. Donaldjohanson is larger than Bennu, Ryugu and Dinkinesh by a solid amount.

    (Image credit: SwRI/ESA/OSIRIS/NASA/Goddard/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab/University of Arizona/JAXA/University of Tokyo & Collaborators)

    Bennu and Ryugu are two asteroids that spacecraft have sampled in previous missions. NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission collected samples from Bennu, and the Hayabusa2 asteroid-sampling spacecraft from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) nabbed samples from Ryugu.

    "We can hardly wait for the flyby because, as of now, Donaldjohanson's characteristics appear very distinct from Bennu and Ryugu. Yet, we may uncover unexpected connections," Marchi added.

    The Trojan asteroids interest researchers because they hold ancient information on how our solar system came to be. "These relics are effectively fossils of the planet formation process, holding vital clues to deciphering the history of our solar system," Hal Levison, the mission's principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, said in the same statement.

    The Lucy spacecraft launched Oct. 16, 2021 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. "Earth-based observing and theoretical models can only take us so far — to validate these models and get to the next level of detail we need close-up data," Keith Noll, Lucy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the same statement.


    Comments

    Popular posts from this blog

    Why did Homo sapiens outlast all other human species?

      From - Live Science By  Mindy Weisberger Edited by - Amal Udawatta Reproductions of skulls from a Neanderthal (left), Homo sapiens (middle) and Australopithecus afarensis (right)   (Image credit: WHPics, Paul Campbell, and Attie Gerber via Getty Images; collage by Marilyn Perkins) Modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) are the sole surviving representatives of the  human family tree , but we're the last sentence in an evolutionary story that began approximately 6 million years ago and spawned at least 18 species known collectively as hominins.  There were at least nine  Homo  species — including  H. sapiens  —  distributed around Africa, Europe and Asia by about 300,000 years ago, according to the Smithsonian's  National Museum of Nat ural History  in Washington, D.C. One by one, all except  H. sapiens  disappeared.  Neanderthals  and a  Homo  group known as the  Denisovans  lived alongside...

    New Comet SWAN Now Visible in Small Scopes

         From :- Sky & Telescope  By :- Bob King  Edited by :- Amal Udawatta This spectacular image of Comet SWAN (C/2025 F2) was taken on April 6th and shows a bright, condensed coma 5′ across and dual ion tails. The longer one extends for 2° in PA 298° and the other 30′ in PA 303°. Details: 11"/ 2.2 RASA and QHY600 camera. Michael Jaeger Amateur astronomers have done it again — discovered a comet. Not by looking through a telescope but through close study of  publicly released, low-resolution images  taken by the  Solar Wind Anisotropies  (SWAN) camera on the orbiting  Solar and Heliospheric Observatory  (SOHO). On March 29th, Vladimir Bezugly of Ukraine was the first to report a moving object in SWAN photos taken the week prior. Michael Mattiazzo of Victoria, Australia, independently found "a pretty obvious comet" the same day using the same images, noting that the object was about 11th magnitude and appeared to be brightening. R...

    The indigenous women saving India's endangered giant yams

      From BBC News   By-  Kamala Thiagarajan   Edited by - Amal Udawatta Sai Krishan, Thirunelly Tribal Special Intervention Programme Lakshmi and Shantha with a species of tuber locally called the Noorang (Credit: Sai Krishan, Thirunelly Tribal Special Intervention Programme) In a tribe in southern India, a group of women are working hard to revive the country's ancient native tubers, and bring them back into everyday culture. Lakshmi spends several hours each day digging out large lumpy and hairy yam tubers, starchy roots that grow below the soil. Some weigh an unwieldy 5kg (11lb) and are 4.5ft-long (1.4m), almost as tall as she is. It's painstaking work, says 58-year-old Lakshmi, who goes by one name. First, she has to cut out the thick shoot above the ground. Then, she uses shovels to dig up the earth around the buried stem and a paddle-like flat chisel to gently pry out the tuber. She uses her hands to dig the tuber out of the ground to avoid damaging its delicate...