The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), an agency responsible for the United States's civil space programme, aeronautics research and space research, announced that its Lucy spacecraft made a close encounter with a small main belt asteroid on Sunday, April 20. Remnants from the early solar system's formation – ranging in size from small fragments to bodies the size of Earth's Moon – asteroids are small, rocky bodies orbiting the Sun, often found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft made the closest approach to the asteroid, codenamed Donaldjohanson, at 1:51 p.m. Eastern Time (0551 GMT) within 960 km at the speed of about 48,000 km per hour. The Lucy spacecraft phoned home after the encounter, and initial information indicated that the spacecraft is in good health, said the operations team. The team has commanded the spacecraft to start sending the data collected during the encounter back to Earth, a process that is expected to take a week. The team will analyze the data to better understand the asteroid, and to prepare for observing the mission's main targets -- the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, which will begin in 2027, according to NASA. The Lucy mission is named after the fossilized skeleton of an early pre-human ancestor found in 1974 in Ethiopia, with the name Lucy given by the team of paleoanthropologists that discovered it. Launched on October 16, 2021, the mission is to survey the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, a never-before-explored population of small bodies that orbit the Sun. Just as the Lucy fossil provided unique insights into human evolution, the Lucy mission aims to expand human knowledge of planetary origins, according to NASA.
