A NASA spacecraft recently got an up-close look at a strange peanut-shaped space rock floating through the cosmos in the main asteroid belt.
Not to worry: Astronomers aren't interested in the small asteroid named Donaldjohanson for any danger it poses to Earth, unlike an infamous 'city-killer' asteroid that briefly attracted attention earlier this year before it, too, was dismissed as a threat.
It's the shape and possible cosmic history of Donaldjohanson that instead intrigued NASA when the space agency's Lucy spacecraft recently passed the asteroid by during its own cosmic journey. The solar-powered probe conducted a flyby on April 20 of the asteroid and has begun transmitting images back to Earth, which NASA released Monday.
Astronomers believe Donaldjohanson is a fragment from a collision 150 million years ago, making it one of the youngest in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter ever visited by a spacecraft. USA today
A NASA spacecraft recently got an up-close look at a strange peanut-shaped space rock floating through the cosmos in the main asteroid belt.
Not to worry: Astronomers aren't interested in the small asteroid named Donaldjohanson for any danger it poses to Earth, unlike an infamous 'city-killer' asteroid that briefly attracted attention earlier this year before it, too, was dismissed as a threat.
It's the shape and possible cosmic history of Donaldjohanson that instead intrigued NASA when the space agency's Lucy spacecraft recently passed the asteroid by during its own cosmic journey. The solar-powered probe conducted a flyby on April 20 of the asteroid and has begun transmitting images back to Earth, which NASA released Monday.
Astronomers believe Donaldjohanson is a fragment from a collision 150 million years ago, making it one of the youngest in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter ever visited by a spacecraft. USA today
A NASA spacecraft recently got an up-close look at a strange peanut-shaped space rock floating through the cosmos in the main asteroid belt.
Not to worry: Astronomers aren't interested in the small asteroid named Donaldjohanson for any danger it poses to Earth, unlike an infamous 'city-killer' asteroid that briefly attracted attention earlier this year before it, too, was dismissed as a threat.
It's the shape and possible cosmic history of Donaldjohanson that instead intrigued NASA when the space agency's Lucy spacecraft recently passed the asteroid by during its own cosmic journey. The solar-powered probe conducted a flyby on April 20 of the asteroid and has begun transmitting images back to Earth, which NASA released Monday.
Astronomers believe Donaldjohanson is a fragment from a collision 150 million years ago, making it one of the youngest in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter ever visited by a spacecraft. USA today
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