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NASA\u2019s Lucy spacecraft has delivered another extraordinary surprise from the asteroid belt, revealing a world whose bizarre shape and complicated motion are challenging simple ideas about how the solar system\u2019s smallest bodies formed. The object, asteroid Donaldjohanson, was photographed during Lucy\u2019s close flyby on April 20, 2025, when the spacecraft passed within approximately 960 kilometers of its surface at a relative speed of about 13.4 kilometers per second. Detailed analysis of the images has shown that Donaldjohanson is a remarkably elongated contact binary\u2014two distinct lobes joined by an extremely narrow neck that researchers have compared to a pair of nested ice-cream cones. Measuring roughly eight kilometers from end to end, the asteroid is also larger and more geologically complicated than scientists had estimated before the encounter.<\/p>\n
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Its two connected sections, heavily cratered terrain and scattered boulders preserve evidence of collisions and reassembly in the main asteroid belt, where fragments can slowly come together under their weak mutual gravity. Even stranger, Donaldjohanson does not spin smoothly around a single stable axis. It tumbles through space in a complex rotation, creating large changes in brightness when observed from Earth and making the reconstruction of its full three-dimensional shape especially difficult. Scientists believe it is a fragment produced by a major collision approximately 150 million years ago, meaning its unusual body could record how debris from a shattered parent asteroid gradually reorganized into new objects.<\/p>\n
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This was not Lucy\u2019s first unexpected discovery. During a 2023 flyby, the spacecraft found that the small asteroid Dinkinesh possessed a previously unknown moon named Selam. Additional images then revealed that Selam was itself composed of two touching lobes\u2014the first contact-binary satellite ever observed orbiting another asteroid. Together, Dinkinesh, Selam and Donaldjohanson suggest that gentle mergers, fragmentation and gravitational reassembly may create far more diverse structures than conventional asteroid models predicted. The dramatic thumbnail accompanying this story highlights a rectangular-looking area on the asteroid, but no NASA analysis has identified it as a door, building, spacecraft or other manufactured object.<\/p>\n
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Shadows, compression artifacts, image sharpening and naturally fractured rock can produce geometric patterns, particularly in low-resolution or heavily edited pictures. Nor did this discovery occur \u201cthree minutes ago\u201d; the flyby took place in 2025, with scientific results emerging gradually as researchers processed and interpreted the data. Nevertheless, the real finding is genuinely significant. Donaldjohanson served as a rehearsal for Lucy\u2019s primary mission: exploring the never-before-visited Trojan asteroids that travel around the Sun near Jupiter\u2019s orbit.<\/p>\n