That seams normal: "Anybody want two merged ice cream cones?" (#nevermind)
It's just that the seam stands out so obviously.
In its second asteroid encounter, NASA's Lucy spacecraft obtained a close look at a uniquely shaped fragment of an asteroid that formed about 150 million years ago. The spacecraft has begun returning images that were collected as it flew approximately 600 miles (960 km) from the asteroid Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025.
The asteroid was previously observed to have large brightness variations over a 10-day period, so some of Lucy team members' expectations were confirmed when the first images showed what appeared to be an elongated contact binary (an object formed when two smaller bodies collide). However, the team was surprised by the odd shape of the narrow neck connecting the two lobes, which looks like two nested ice cream cones.
"Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly complicated geology," says Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy at Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. "As we study the complex structures in detail, they will reveal important information about the building blocks and collisional processes that formed the planets in our Solar System."
The asteroid was previously observed to have large brightness variations over a 10-day period, so some of Lucy team members' expectations were confirmed when the first images showed what appeared to be an elongated contact binary (an object formed when two smaller bodies collide). However, the team was surprised by the odd shape of the narrow neck connecting the two lobes, which looks like two nested ice cream cones.
"Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly complicated geology," says Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy at Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado. "As we study the complex structures in detail, they will reveal important information about the building blocks and collisional processes that formed the planets in our Solar System."
It's important to note, Lucy has an extraordinary future yet to come. The spacecraft's prior encounter with asteroid Dinkenish was a system test, and the Donaldjohansen flyby is described as a full dress rehearsal. After navigating through the main belt, Lucy will pursue trojan asteroid Eurybates for a scheduled rendezvous in August, 2027.
From a preliminary analysis of the first available images collected by the spacecraft's L'LORRI imager, the asteroid appears to be larger than originally estimated, about 5 miles (8 km) long and 2 miles (3.5 km) wide at the widest point. In this first set of high-resolution images returned from the spacecraft, the full asteroid is not visible as the asteroid is larger than the imager's field of view. It will take up to a week for the team to downlink the remainder of the encounter data from the spacecraft; this dataset will give a more complete picture of the asteroid's overall shape ....
.... Data collected by Lucy's other scientific instruments, the L'Ralph color imager and infrared spectrometer and the L'TES thermal infrared spectrometer, will be retrieved and analyzed over the next few weeks.
.... Data collected by Lucy's other scientific instruments, the L'Ralph color imager and infrared spectrometer and the L'TES thermal infrared spectrometer, will be retrieved and analyzed over the next few weeks.
Once again, what a show.
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Notes:
NASA Science Editorial Team. "NASA's Lucy Spacecraft Images Asteroid Donaldjohanson". 21 April 2025. Science.NASA.gov. 21 April 2025. https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-lucy-spacecraft-images-asteroid-donaldjohanson/