Corey S Powellcoreyspowell@mastodon.social

Oct 30, 2026, 11:09 PM

The early discoveries from Lucy have already been wonderfully weird. Like the asteroid Donaldjohanson, an 8-km-wide fragment from a collision that occurred some 150 million years ago, around the time of Stegosaurus and Allosaurus.

https://lucy.swri.edu/Donaldjohanson.html #space #science #nature #history

This main belt asteroid serves as a full dress-rehersal for Lucy's future Trojan asteroid encounters. While it was selected as an enginnering target, it is also an interesting object itself as it has been identified as a fragment of a massive collision that occurred around 150 million years ago that produced the Erigone family of asteroids. This makes it an extremely young, at least compared to most other objects in the Solar System.