NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, on its journey to explore the Trojan asteroids near Jupiter, has captured a strange-looking asteroid named Donaldjohanson. The asteroid looks like two ice cream cones stuck together.

On April 20, 2025, Lucy flew close to this asteroid, passing at a distance of about 960 kilometres. The pictures it took during the flyby surprised scientists. The asteroid seems to be a "contact binary", which means it was formed when two smaller space rocks bumped into each other and stuck together. The shape of the asteroid supports this idea, as it has two lobes connected by a narrow “neck”, which the team says looks like two nested ice cream cones.

Hal Levison, the principal investigator for the Lucy mission, said, “Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly complicated geology. 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.”

NASA said that Donaldjohanson was already known to have large brightness changes over a 10-day period. This suggested that the asteroid was not a perfect sphere. The new images confirmed this idea and showed that the asteroid is larger than expected—about 8 kilometres long and 3.5 kilometres wide.

The full asteroid isn’t visible in the first high-resolution images because it is bigger than the camera’s field of view. NASA said it may take up to a week to receive the rest of the images from the spacecraft.

This asteroid is not one of Lucy’s main targets. Instead, this flyby was a test for the spacecraft’s systems. It was also used as a rehearsal to prepare for more important asteroid flybys in the future.

Lucy will now continue its journey through the main asteroid belt and is expected to reach its first main science target, the Jupiter Trojan asteroid Eurybates, in August 2027.

 

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