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NASA's Lucy spacecraft has beamed backmost pictures from its latest asteroid flyby, revealing a long, lumpy abstraction stone that resembles an odd-shaped peanut.
The abstraction bureau released the images Monday, a time aft the adjacent attack astatine a velocity of more than 30,000 mph. It was considered a formal rehearsal for the much captious asteroid encounters up person to Jupiter.
This asteroid is bigger than scientists anticipated, astir 5 miles agelong and 2 miles wide astatine its widest constituent — resembling a deformed peanut. It's truthful agelong that the spacecraft couldn't seizure it successful its entirety successful the archetypal downloaded images.
NASA besides released a timelapse of images captured astir each 2 seconds, showing the asteroid rotating precise slowly, seemingly owed to the spacecraft's question arsenic it flies by.
Data returned implicit the adjacent week should assistance clarify the asteroid's shape, according to NASA.
Lucy passed wrong 600 miles of the harmless asteroid known arsenic Donaldjohanson connected Sunday successful the main asteroid loop betwixt Mars and Jupiter. It's named for the paleontologist who discovered the fossil Lucy 50 years agone successful Ethiopia.
"Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly analyzable geology," Hal Levison, main researcher for Lucy astatine Southwest Research Institute, said successful a statement. "As we survey the analyzable structures successful detail, they volition uncover important accusation astir the gathering blocks and collisional processes that formed the planets successful our star system."
The spacecraft was launched successful 2021 to survey the unexplored alleged Trojan asteroids retired adjacent Jupiter. Eight Trojan flybys are planned done 2033.
NASA's Lucy spacecraft has beamed backmost pictures from its latest asteroid flyby, revealing a long, lumpy abstraction stone that resembles an odd-shaped peanut.
NASA
"These aboriginal images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft arsenic an motor of discovery," Tom Statler, programme idiosyncratic for the Lucy ngo astatine NASA Headquarters successful Washington, said successful a statement. "The imaginable to truly unfastened a caller model into the past of our star strategy erstwhile Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense."
The spacecraft is named after the 3.2 million-year-old skeletal remains of a quality ancestor recovered successful Ethiopia, which got its sanction from the 1967 Beatles opus "Lucy successful the Sky with Diamonds." That prompted NASA to motorboat the spacecraft into abstraction with set members' lyrics and different luminaries' words of contented imprinted connected a plaque. The spacecraft besides carried a disc made of lab-grown diamonds for 1 of its subject instruments.
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