Monday 21/April/2025 – 01:25 AM
Lucy spacecraft is preparing For NASA For a near and exciting date with a strange asteroid known as Donald Johansson, on a scientific mission more than 100 million miles from Earth.
NASA is approaching a strange asteroid, 100 million miles away from Earth
It is expected that the vehicle will pass near the asteroid on Sunday afternoon, to start sending the first clear pictures of a satellite rock that preliminary estimates described as either in the form of a “snowy man” or “Poling Pin”, amid ambiguity surrounding the nature of this unique celestial body.
The asteroid, which is about 2.5 miles long, is believed to be the product of an old collision, and it is much smaller compared to the asteroids surrounding it, and scientists indicated that “Donald Johansson” may actually be two asteroids revolving around each other in a binary system.
We do not know what we will see, and this is what makes this meeting very exciting, what we are sure of is that we are not dealing with an ordinary space rock.
Lucy, which moves quickly across space on a mission from which you will not return to Earth, will go through only 596 miles from the surface of the asteroid, in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
This flight is a training experience of what is coming, as the main task of the “Lucy” probe is to explore the asteroids of Trojan, and it embraces a group of rocks that revolve around the sun near Jupiter’s orbit.
In 2023, Lucy scored her first meeting with an asteroid called “Denkinch”, where the photos revealed the presence of a small moon around him, in a discovery that was not expected.
The vehicle is scheduled to pass 11 asteroids in general during its journey, before settling in a permanent orbit, with a golden plate with messages and information about our civilization, in anticipation of its discovery one day by future space civilizations.
The current asteroid was named after the famous fossil world, Donald Johansson, who in the 1970s discovered the remains of “Lucy”, a skeleton belonging to one of the oldest ancestors of human beings, and is estimated at about three million years old.
The Donald Johansson asteroids is scheduled to join himself to the scientific team to follow up on this space event from the NASA control center.
