6 Min Read

NASA’s Moon Orbiter Spots New, ‘Once-in-Century’ Moon Crater

It started as a routine data-quality check. But as Robert Wagner, a scientist with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scanned a giant Moon map on his computer screen, an unusually large bright spot circled by a dark halo caught his eye, as it implied that surface material in that area had been shaken up.

“I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” said Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system.

By comparing before and after images of the Moon, Wagner realized he had discovered the largest, newly formed crater ever found in the solar system, as scientists reported Wednesday in Science Advances. This discovery highlights the value of NASA’s Moon orbiter data in studying a dynamic landscape as the agency advances a sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity on the Moon.

Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
 
The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses.
 
Scientists estimate that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century or even longer.

Moon takes some hits

For more than 17 years, LRO has been circling the Moon and using its seven instruments to map the topography, surface composition, temperature, and radiation environment there. The spacecraft’s team has identified at least 1,000 new impact craters throughout the mission and flagged 100,000 more surface changes from an object smashing into the Moon or from the debris that flung out after.

With no atmosphere to slow them or burn them up, space rocks and other objects easily reach the lunar surface. Most are much smaller compared to the object that carved out McGetchin crater. The smallest craters scientists can distinguish from LRO images are about 30 feet wide, the length of a three-story building laid on its side, made by rocks about 43 inches wide, the size of a monster-truck tire. Scientists estimate that impacts of this scale produce about 140 new craters across the Moon each year. But most new ones are made by microscopic projectiles that leave holes too small to identify in orbital images.

With its numerous instruments, the spacecraft can observe changes to the lunar surface that aren’t apparent in the LROC images alone. After the crater was discovered, scientists working with LRO’s thermal instrument, Diviner, made follow-up observations of the site. They found a 4-mile-wide area around the crater that is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings.

Reporting in a second paper Wednesday in the same journal, researchers say that the cooling happens because the impact fluffs up the regolith around the crater, making it less dense and therefore less able to retain heat.

The large extent of this “cold spot” is striking, scientists say, because it shows that impacts can modify the Moon’s surface far beyond the crater itself. These physical changes could affect how rover wheels interact with the surface, for instance.

Road to discovery

The LROC system collects images from about 60 miles above the Moon as LRO loops from pole to pole. The system includes two cameras that capture high‑resolution black‑and‑white images and one camera for moderate‑resolution multispectral images. Over the years and thousands of passes, scientists have built maps detailed enough to spot not only new craters, but also landslides, landers, seismic faults, and even hints of lava tubes.

LROC scientists regularly analyze close-up images of small portions of the Moon’s surface taken by the Narrow-Angle Camera. Using these images, they look for changes that are typically less than 30 feet across. But every few years the team searches for large (wider than 150 feet) features by creating global Moon maps and comparing them to older versions.

That’s what Wagner was doing on Oct. 24, 2025, when he came across McGetchin. Using images from LROC’s Wide-Angle Camera, which captures broad views with pixels the size of football fields, he stacked hundreds of “before” and “after” frames with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same turned gray while anything different showed up as bright or dark patches.

While the process sounds straightforward, spotting real craters requires a lot of manual work. The software flags every tiny shift in lighting or shadow, generating hundreds of false alarms. For this reason, Wagner typically verifies the software, looking for small fuzzy halos around pixel‑wide bright points, which indicate splashes of regolith around a new crater.

Spanning hundreds of pixels, McGetchin stood out immediately. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said.

After his discovery, scientists turned to the Narrow-Angle Camera, which takes much sharper views at about 3 feet per pixel. This camera’s close-up images, taken as LRO flew over the impact site again, revealed the crater size, shape, and how the surrounding terrain was affected. These images also helped researchers estimate the size and force of the rock fragment that formed the new crater, details that are expected to appear in a future paper.

Banner image caption: A zoomed-in view of the Moon, with debris around McGetchin crater visible as a white spot circled by a dark halo just right of center of the image (marked with black arrows). This is the view that Robert Wagner saw on Oct. 24, 2025, during a routine data-quality check. Wagner is an image processing specialist for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, a system of three cameras. Using images from the Wide-Angle Camera (WAC), which captures broad views with pixels the size of American football fields, he stacked hundreds of images captured by WAC over the last several years with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same is gray; anything that changed showed up as bright or dark patches. The stripes in the image are due to slight changes in lighting between the older and newer images. This image composite shows an area of the Moon approximately 900 miles across.

About the Author

Lonnie Shekhtman

Senior Science Writer

Shekhtman helps communicate NASA planetary science to the world through news and feature stories on NASA.gov, videos for NASA+ and YouTube, and by working with the media. She reports on lunar and Mars science and exploration; NASA's search for life; missions to Venus, Titan, and Jupiter's Trojan asteroids; and many other topics related to NASA's exploration of our solar system and beyond.

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The post NASA’s Moon Orbiter Spots New, ‘Once-in-Century’ Moon Crater appeared first on NASA Science.

6 Min Read

NASA’s Moon Orbiter Spots New, ‘Once-in-Century’ Moon Crater

It started as a routine data-quality check. But as Robert Wagner, a scientist with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scanned a giant Moon map on his computer screen, an unusually large bright spot circled by a dark halo caught his eye, as it implied that surface material in that area had been shaken up.

“I just stopped, dropped everything, and started looking into what that spot was,” said Wagner, an image-processing specialist from Intuitive Machines who works with data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) system.

By comparing before and after images of the Moon, Wagner realized he had discovered the largest, newly formed crater ever found in the solar system, as scientists reported Wednesday in Science Advances. This discovery highlights the value of NASA’s Moon orbiter data in studying a dynamic landscape as the agency advances a sustained human presence and expanded scientific and commercial activity on the Moon.

Officially named McGetchin after pioneering lunar scientist Tom McGetchin, the crater formed on the Moon’s eastern edge sometime between April 11 and May 22, 2024, after a comet or asteroid the size of a three- to six-story building hit the surface.
 
The crash left a crater, 728 feet wide, that spans the length of two football fields. And at 141 feet deep, the crater could fit three vertically stacked yellow school buses.
 
Scientists estimate that an impact of this magnitude happens on the Moon about once in a century or even longer.

Moon takes some hits

For more than 17 years, LRO has been circling the Moon and using its seven instruments to map the topography, surface composition, temperature, and radiation environment there. The spacecraft’s team has identified at least 1,000 new impact craters throughout the mission and flagged 100,000 more surface changes from an object smashing into the Moon or from the debris that flung out after.

With no atmosphere to slow them or burn them up, space rocks and other objects easily reach the lunar surface. Most are much smaller compared to the object that carved out McGetchin crater. The smallest craters scientists can distinguish from LRO images are about 30 feet wide, the length of a three-story building laid on its side, made by rocks about 43 inches wide, the size of a monster-truck tire. Scientists estimate that impacts of this scale produce about 140 new craters across the Moon each year. But most new ones are made by microscopic projectiles that leave holes too small to identify in orbital images.

With its numerous instruments, the spacecraft can observe changes to the lunar surface that aren’t apparent in the LROC images alone. After the crater was discovered, scientists working with LRO’s thermal instrument, Diviner, made follow-up observations of the site. They found a 4-mile-wide area around the crater that is about 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler at night than its surroundings.

Reporting in a second paper Wednesday in the same journal, researchers say that the cooling happens because the impact fluffs up the regolith around the crater, making it less dense and therefore less able to retain heat.

The large extent of this “cold spot” is striking, scientists say, because it shows that impacts can modify the Moon’s surface far beyond the crater itself. These physical changes could affect how rover wheels interact with the surface, for instance.

Road to discovery

The LROC system collects images from about 60 miles above the Moon as LRO loops from pole to pole. The system includes two cameras that capture high‑resolution black‑and‑white images and one camera for moderate‑resolution multispectral images. Over the years and thousands of passes, scientists have built maps detailed enough to spot not only new craters, but also landslides, landers, seismic faults, and even hints of lava tubes.

LROC scientists regularly analyze close-up images of small portions of the Moon’s surface taken by the Narrow-Angle Camera. Using these images, they look for changes that are typically less than 30 feet across. But every few years the team searches for large (wider than 150 feet) features by creating global Moon maps and comparing them to older versions.

That’s what Wagner was doing on Oct. 24, 2025, when he came across McGetchin. Using images from LROC’s Wide-Angle Camera, which captures broad views with pixels the size of football fields, he stacked hundreds of “before” and “after” frames with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same turned gray while anything different showed up as bright or dark patches.

While the process sounds straightforward, spotting real craters requires a lot of manual work. The software flags every tiny shift in lighting or shadow, generating hundreds of false alarms. For this reason, Wagner typically verifies the software, looking for small fuzzy halos around pixel‑wide bright points, which indicate splashes of regolith around a new crater.

Spanning hundreds of pixels, McGetchin stood out immediately. “It was by far the most obvious impact debris pattern I’ve ever seen in one of these images,” Wagner said.

After his discovery, scientists turned to the Narrow-Angle Camera, which takes much sharper views at about 3 feet per pixel. This camera’s close-up images, taken as LRO flew over the impact site again, revealed the crater size, shape, and how the surrounding terrain was affected. These images also helped researchers estimate the size and force of the rock fragment that formed the new crater, details that are expected to appear in a future paper.

Banner image caption: A zoomed-in view of the Moon, with debris around McGetchin crater visible as a white spot circled by a dark halo just right of center of the image (marked with black arrows). This is the view that Robert Wagner saw on Oct. 24, 2025, during a routine data-quality check. Wagner is an image processing specialist for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, a system of three cameras. Using images from the Wide-Angle Camera (WAC), which captures broad views with pixels the size of American football fields, he stacked hundreds of images captured by WAC over the last several years with software designed to highlight change. Anything that stayed the same is gray; anything that changed showed up as bright or dark patches. The stripes in the image are due to slight changes in lighting between the older and newer images. This image composite shows an area of the Moon approximately 900 miles across.

About the Author

Lonnie Shekhtman

Senior Science Writer

Shekhtman helps communicate NASA planetary science to the world through news and feature stories on NASA.gov, videos for NASA+ and YouTube, and by working with the media. She reports on lunar and Mars science and exploration; NASA’s search for life; missions to Venus, Titan, and Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids; and many other topics related to NASA’s exploration of our solar system and beyond.

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NASA Langley Hall of Honor

Recognizing those who were instrumental in NACA and NASA Langley’s successes.

Nominations Open: Hall of Honor – Class of 2027

The 2027 class will be Langley’s fourth, following previous class inductions in 2015, 2017, and 2022

Learn More

About the Hall of Honor

The Langley Research Center National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Hall of Honor was conceived by members of the Langley Alumni Association and the NASA Langley Research Center as a mechanism to pay tribute to individuals who built exemplary careers at Langley, persevered against the status quo when required and achieved revolutionary scientific understanding and technological progress on the frontiers of the aerospace sciences.

The Hall of Honor formally recognizes those persons whose contributions have had the most sustained and far-reaching influence on the leadership, direction, mission and capabilities of the NACA Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory and NASA Langley Research Center and/or whose work at Langley enabled unprecedented and fundamental advancements in either a scientific or engineering field and made significant contributions to the United States’ aerospace industry for commercial and military aircraft and/or spacecraft.

History

NASA Langley Unveils 2022 Hall of Honor

Famed Hidden Figure Christine Darden was one of 17 members of the 2022 class of inductees to take their rightful place in the Langley Research Center NACA and NASA Hall of Honor – the third such ceremony to take place.

Learn More about NASA Langley Unveils 2022 Hall of Honor

Further reading

Class of 2017

Langley’s second Hall of Honor class included such luminaries as Katherine Johnson, Floyd Thompson, and James Martin.

Class of 2015

The first Hall of Honor inductees included, among others, Pearl Young, John Becker, and Maxime Faget.

Langley Alumni Association and Hall of Honor Nomination Form

Learn more about the Langley Alumni Association (LAA) and how to nominate someone for the Hall of Honor.

The post NASA Langley Hall of Honor appeared first on NASA Science.

NASA has declared “wrenches down” on the first completed payload designed for Artemis astronauts to deploy on the Moon’s surface. Engineers working on NASA’s Lunar Environment Monitoring Station, or LEMS, have completed hardware development and testing and the payload is ready for its permanent home near the lunar South Pole. With the hardware complete, LEMS is ready to support one of the Artemis program’s core goals: enabling sustained lunar science and exploration.

The LEMS instrument package contains two highly sensitive seismometers that will monitor ground vibrations from moonquakes and meteorite impacts, providing scientists with insights into the Moon’s interior and the seismic hazards astronauts might encounter at the surface. Its modular design allows the system to be adapted or expanded to host new instruments in the future, creating a reusable platform that can evolve as scientific priorities grow.

The payload will remain in a clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where it was built, until it is assigned to an Artemis mission for deployment to the lunar surface.

“The completion of the LEMS scientific instrument is a major step in a new era of lunar surface science. Innovative science experiments will uncover, measure, and reveal the Moon’s secrets while astronauts open new frontiers for discovery,” said Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “And, behind the scenes, countless teams across NASA and our partners are pushing the boundaries of what surface instruments can do, building the tools that will make future exploration possible and safer.”

The LEMS payload builds on a legacy of lunar seismic tracking. Apollo astronauts deployed a network of seismometers on the Moon’s nearside equatorial region between 1969 and 1972. Those instruments operated until 1977, recording about 13,000 moonquakes and other ground vibrations that helped scientists begin to understand the composition of the Moon’s interior. For decades, researchers have hoped to spread more seismometers, updated with new technologies, across the lunar surface.

Now, LEMS will carry the first seismometers to be deployed by future astronauts to listen for faint ground vibrations, collecting new clues to the Moon’s internal structure and ongoing seismic activity. The sensors will be the most compact, sensitive, and energy-efficient seismometers ever built for planetary exploration.

LEMS itself is about the size of a small suitcase, weighing 11 pounds in the Moon’s low-gravity environment. It will carry not just these seismic sensors, but everything it needs to function independently of humans after deployment. LEMS is built to manage its own power production via a lightweight, flexible solar array that conforms to the shape of the LEMS unit. It also will manage its operational activities to ensure continuous data collection based on a preset plan, and monthly data transmission to Earth. The payload will do all this while maintaining a stable internal temperature throughout the massive day-to-night temperature swings of the South Pole region.

“When we conceived of LEMS, we weren’t just thinking about the next mission, we were thinking about the next generation of lunar exploration,” said Mehdi Benna, a University of Maryland Baltimore County scientist who leads LEMS from NASA Goddard. “Our vision was to create a scientific buoy for the Moon. Like an ocean buoy on Earth, LEMS is designed to be easy to build, adaptable to different scientific objectives, and capable of operating independently for years.”

Before any surface science could happen, Benna and his team had to ensure that LEMS could survive the trip to the Moon and the harsh environment of its surface. Over the past five months, LEMS and its components have been subjected to a demanding series of environmental and operational tests. Engineers verified LEMS can endure the violent shaking of launch, the journey to the lunar surface, and the Moon’s temperature and radiation environment. The team also showed that the instrument package’s mechanical and electrical design is safe for astronaut handling.

The LEMS payload was built to operate through the lunar night, which lasts two Earth weeks, without external power assistance or a heat source. Past lunar surface instruments relied on radioisotope heaters for warmth and power. But LEMS instead will withstand temperatures that dip to minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit in some areas by using advanced insulation materials, low-thermal-conductivity cables that minimize heat loss, and a thermal regulator that conducts heat away during the day to prevent overheating and helps retain heat at night.

These innovations reduce mass and power needs, setting the stage for lighter, energy-efficient instruments that can operate continuously at future Artemis landing sites and the NASA-led Moon Base.

The LEMS payload is led by University of Maryland Baltimore County and University of Maryland College Park. Technical implementation is led by NASA Goddard. The University of Arizona, in partnership with Silicon Audio, Inc., supplied LEMS’ two state-of-the-art seismometers. Morehead State University in Kentucky provided LEMS’ telecommunication system and will operate the instrument on the surface. Washington University in St. Louis will manage the instrument’s data processing and dissemination to the larger scientific community.

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NASA MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission scientists have uncovered a key puzzle piece in understanding certain types of auroras on Mars, finding that they form in a similar way to Earth-based auroras.
 
Results published Thursday in Nature Communications show the same mechanism that circulates and catapults charged particles into Earth’s atmosphere is happening at Mars on much smaller scales because of differences in the two planets’ magnetic fields.
 
The MAVEN spacecraft, in orbit around Mars, experienced a loss of signal with ground stations on Earth on Dec. 6, 2025. On June 3, NASA declared the mission had concluded after finding the spacecraft to be unrecoverable. However, data from the mission is still being used to inform NASA science and future missions to Mars.
 
When the Sun’s magnetic field lines get close to Earth’s magnetosphere, the large magnetic bubble protecting the planet, they can reconnect and inject energy and mass throughout Earth’s magnetosphere and magnetotail, ultimately firing electrons back into the atmosphere to generate Earth’s auroras. This process, called the Dungey cycle, drives electrical currents, accelerates charged particles that create auroras, and controls the circulation of plasma in Earth’s magnetosphere and ionosphere.
 
This new study shows that a miniature version of the Dungey cycle is happening over Mars’ strong crustal magnetic fields, which gives scientists a better look into the physics of Martian auroras.
 
“We knew that magnetic reconnection was happening at Mars but did not expect it to be like the Dungey cycle,” said Shaosui Xu, lead author of the study and associate research physicist at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.
 
Mars does not have a global magnetic field like Earth. Earth’s magnetic field is created by our planet’s churning core, while Mars has numerous miniature magnetospheres that arise from intensely magnetized crust scattered around the planet.  These regions were formed around 4 billion years ago when lava cooled in the presence of Mars’ ancient global magnetic field, which has since disappeared due to intense solar wind stripping the planet’s atmosphere.
 
The MAVEN mission has observed highly localized auroras over these crustal fields, similar to Earth’s auroras at the poles, but it wasn’t until now that scientists could fully understand the physics of how they form. The study used several instruments aboard the MAVEN spacecraft to build up a picture of the Dungey-like behavior: the Magnetometer and Solar Wind Electron Analyzer instruments, which were used to determine the magnetic configuration and derive electrical currents, and the STATIC (Suprathermal and Thermal Ion Composition) instrument, which was used to measure plasma flows in the ionosphere.
 
“We really pushed the limit of STATIC to get the data we needed,” said Xu. “It was the final piece to the puzzle in understanding these localized auroras.”
 
The realization that a Dungey-like cycle was happening within these crustal magnetic fields answered the question of how the electrons were being energized to create the auroras. It also shows that a Dungey-like mechanism can happen on both large and small scales, giving more insight into where in the solar system this process could be taking place.
 
“This is a remarkable result that changes how we think of Martian auroras and is another important step toward understanding why Mars and Earth have evolved so differently despite being governed by the same underlying physics.” said Shannon Curry, MAVEN’s principal investigator and a research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. “I am incredibly proud of our team’s work on this discovery and excited to uncover new insights into the Red Planet and its evolution.”
 
By finding out more about this process, scientists also are gaining a better understanding of how the solar environment interacts with the Red Planet as a whole, which is essential for future robotic and crewed missions.
 
“I remember in graduate school discussing with my advisor how the cycling of crustal magnetic fields could work at Mars,” said Xu. “It’s incredible to be part of the team that found the answer to that question.”
 
The MAVEN mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. The mission’s principal investigator is based at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, which also is responsible for managing science operations and public outreach and communications. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the MAVEN mission. Lockheed Martin Space built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California provides navigation and Deep Space Network support.
 
For more information on NASA’s MAVEN mission, visit:
 
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/maven/
 
Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
Headquarters, Washington
240-285-5155 / 202-672-4780
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov
 
Lonnie Shekhtman
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
lonnie.shekhtman@nasa.gov

Even small asteroids lead complex lives. During its flyby of the asteroid Donaldjohanson last year, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft revealed the asteroid to be a wobbly, peanut-shaped body that has undergone a lot of activity in its relatively short history. Formed as fragments coalesced after a violent collision 155 million years ago, the asteroid was transformed by the small but inexorable force of the Sun’s radiation, all while retaining signs of the brief presence of liquid water in its distant past.

Zooming through the main asteroid belt toward one of the Jupiter Trojan asteroid groups, the Lucy spacecraft collected the first close-up images and other data at Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025, as it passed 650 miles away from the asteroid. The data revealed that, instead of spinning simply around one axis like most other asteroids and planets, Donaldjohanson has a more complicated two-axis rotation. Scientists also saw Donaldjohanson’s peanut shape and the craters and ridges on its surface.

Lucy’s encounter with the asteroid was planned as a dress rehearsal for the spacecraft and mission team before its primary asteroid encounters, which begin with Lucy’s flyby of the Trojan asteroid Eurybates on Aug. 12, 2027. The instruments performed as expected, and, as a bonus, scientists got a rare opportunity to study a previously unexplored asteroid up close and to compare it to two asteroids with similar compositions but different histories: Bennu, the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample-return mission, and Ryugu, the site of JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 sample-return mission.

Here’s what Lucy’s science team has learned so far from Lucy’s encounter with Donaldjohanson, as reported on June 18 in the journal Science.

Wobbling rotation

With Earth-based telescopes, observers saw fluctuations in the light Donaldjohanson reflects, regular patterns of peaks and valleys, typical of an elongated object rotating once every 10.5 Earth days. But Lucy’s data revealed another pattern: Donaldjohanson appears to be rotating like a wobbly top. Paper authors reported that the asteroid rotates end-over-end once every 10.5 Earth days, and wobbles back and forth around its long axis once every 26.5 days.

Peanut shape

While the Earth-based observations hinted at Donaldjohanson’s elongated shape, the Lucy flyby revealed a “bilobate” structure: two lobes connected by a neck, like a peanut. These lobes are likely two fragments from an asteroid collision that gently came together afterward by their mutual gravity.

Donaldjohanson likely rotated at least 10 times faster when it formed, having slowed to its current rate in the last 20 to 60 million years, the team estimates. As it slowed, the balance between the centrifugal force pushing things apart and gravity pulling things together changed and loose rocky material slid down slopes creating the worn-down appearance of many craters, as the flyby images showed.

The paper’s authors say that the asteroid’s slowing rotation is likely caused by a subtle consequence of solar heating known as the YORP effect. Each part of the asteroid’s Sun-warmed surface radiates heat away as infrared light, and that radiation imparts a tiny recoil force to the surface. Because the asteroid’s shape isn’t symmetric, this results in a net torque, or twist, that can change the asteroid’s rotation. Thus, YORP can slow asteroid spins down or speed them up, as in the case of Bennu (once every four hours) and Ryugu (once about every seven hours), which both likely used to rotate much slower than they do today.

Fleeting water

As it passed by Donaldjohanson at 30,000 mph, Lucy recorded the signatures of iron-rich clay minerals on the surface. These clays must have formed in the distant past with the help of liquid water. However, the exposure must have been brief, Lucy scientists concluded, because iron in clays tends to be replaced with other elements, such as magnesium, as water lingers.

Indeed, scientists saw magnesium-rich clays at Bennu and Ryugu, which suggested prolonged water exposure, perhaps lasting millions of years, when they were still part of larger asteroids.

This difference in water exposure history, and other characteristics, may mean that the parent bodies of these asteroids formed at different times or in different regions of the solar system before relocating to the main belt.

Compare, contrast

Donaldjohanson is thought to be made from rocky remnants of a larger, carbon- and water-rich asteroid that collided with another object in the main asteroid belt. Bennu and Ryugu are thought to have formed in the same way and in the same region.

But Donaldjohanson is different. At 155 million years old, it is much younger than Bennu and Ryugu, which formed 1 to 2 billion years ago. Donaldjohanson also has remained in the asteroid belt since birth, while its wandering cousins migrated into orbits around the Sun that bring them close to Earth’s orbit about once a year (which made them perfect close targets for sample return missions).

“It’s helpful for scientists to compare Donaldjohanson with asteroids like Bennu and Ryugu, which are seemingly similar asteroids, because every subtle difference is another clue to our origin story,” said Simone Marchi, Lucy deputy principal investigator and lead author of the study at the Boulder, Colorado, office of the Southwest Research Institute.

“Once we start learning more about the Trojans, a completely different population of space rocks with very different histories, our understanding of solar system formation is destined to be challenged,” said Marchi.

Named after a fossilized skeleton of a human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, NASA’s Lucy will be the first mission to explore Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, a population of well-preserved space rocks that formed early in our solar system’s history and could help scientists understand how the planets formed and moved around before settling in their current configuration.

Download story graphics from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.

About Lucy:

Lucy’s principal investigator is based out of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of Southwest Research Institute, headquartered in San Antonio. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Lucy is the 13th mission in NASA’s Discovery Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information on NASA’s Lucy mission, visit:

By Lonnie Shekhtman

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

and

Katherine Kretke

Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.

Media Contacts:

Karen Fox / Molly Wasser

Headquarters, Washington
240-285-5155 / 240-419-1732
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov

Sarah Frazier

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
202-853-7191
sarah.frazier@nasa.gov

The post NASA’s Lucy Reveals Wobbling, Peanut-Shaped Asteroid appeared first on NASA Science.

Even small asteroids lead complex lives. During its flyby of the asteroid Donaldjohanson last year, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft revealed the asteroid to be a wobbly, peanut-shaped body that has undergone a lot of activity in its relatively short history. Formed as fragments coalesced after a violent collision 155 million years ago, the asteroid was transformed by the small but inexorable force of the Sun’s radiation, all while retaining signs of the brief presence of liquid water in its distant past.

Zooming through the main asteroid belt toward one of the Jupiter Trojan asteroid groups, the Lucy spacecraft collected the first close-up images and other data at Donaldjohanson on April 20, 2025, as it passed 650 miles away from the asteroid. The data revealed that, instead of spinning simply around one axis like most other asteroids and planets, Donaldjohanson has a more complicated two-axis rotation. Scientists also saw Donaldjohanson’s peanut shape and the craters and ridges on its surface.

Lucy’s encounter with the asteroid was planned as a dress rehearsal for the spacecraft and mission team before its primary asteroid encounters, which begin with Lucy’s flyby of the Trojan asteroid Eurybates on Aug. 12, 2027. The instruments performed as expected, and, as a bonus, scientists got a rare opportunity to study a previously unexplored asteroid up close and to compare it to two asteroids with similar compositions but different histories: Bennu, the target of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample-return mission, and Ryugu, the site of JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Hayabusa2 sample-return mission.

Here’s what Lucy’s science team has learned so far from Lucy’s encounter with Donaldjohanson, as reported on June 18 in the journal Science.

Wobbling rotation

With Earth-based telescopes, observers saw fluctuations in the light Donaldjohanson reflects, regular patterns of peaks and valleys, typical of an elongated object rotating once every 10.5 Earth days. But Lucy’s data revealed another pattern: Donaldjohanson appears to be rotating like a wobbly top. Paper authors reported that the asteroid rotates end-over-end once every 10.5 Earth days, and wobbles back and forth around its long axis once every 26.5 days.

Peanut shape

While the Earth-based observations hinted at Donaldjohanson’s elongated shape, the Lucy flyby revealed a “bilobate” structure: two lobes connected by a neck, like a peanut. These lobes are likely two fragments from an asteroid collision that gently came together afterward by their mutual gravity.

Donaldjohanson likely rotated at least 10 times faster when it formed, having slowed to its current rate in the last 20 to 60 million years, the team estimates. As it slowed, the balance between the centrifugal force pushing things apart and gravity pulling things together changed and loose rocky material slid down slopes creating the worn-down appearance of many craters, as the flyby images showed.

The paper’s authors say that the asteroid’s slowing rotation is likely caused by a subtle consequence of solar heating known as the YORP effect. Each part of the asteroid’s Sun-warmed surface radiates heat away as infrared light, and that radiation imparts a tiny recoil force to the surface. Because the asteroid’s shape isn’t symmetric, this results in a net torque, or twist, that can change the asteroid’s rotation. Thus, YORP can slow asteroid spins down or speed them up, as in the case of Bennu (once every four hours) and Ryugu (once about every seven hours), which both likely used to rotate much slower than they do today.

Fleeting water

As it passed by Donaldjohanson at 30,000 mph, Lucy recorded the signatures of iron-rich clay minerals on the surface. These clays must have formed in the distant past with the help of liquid water. However, the exposure must have been brief, Lucy scientists concluded, because iron in clays tends to be replaced with other elements, such as magnesium, as water lingers.

Indeed, scientists saw magnesium-rich clays at Bennu and Ryugu, which suggested prolonged water exposure, perhaps lasting millions of years, when they were still part of larger asteroids.

This difference in water exposure history, and other characteristics, may mean that the parent bodies of these asteroids formed at different times or in different regions of the solar system before relocating to the main belt.

Compare, contrast

Donaldjohanson is thought to be made from rocky remnants of a larger, carbon- and water-rich asteroid that collided with another object in the main asteroid belt. Bennu and Ryugu are thought to have formed in the same way and in the same region.

But Donaldjohanson is different. At 155 million years old, it is much younger than Bennu and Ryugu, which formed 1 to 2 billion years ago. Donaldjohanson also has remained in the asteroid belt since birth, while its wandering cousins migrated into orbits around the Sun that bring them close to Earth’s orbit about once a year (which made them perfect close targets for sample return missions).

“It’s helpful for scientists to compare Donaldjohanson with asteroids like Bennu and Ryugu, which are seemingly similar asteroids, because every subtle difference is another clue to our origin story,” said Simone Marchi, Lucy deputy principal investigator and lead author of the study at the Boulder, Colorado, office of the Southwest Research Institute.

“Once we start learning more about the Trojans, a completely different population of space rocks with very different histories, our understanding of solar system formation is destined to be challenged,” said Marchi.

Named after a fossilized skeleton of a human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, NASA’s Lucy will be the first mission to explore Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, a population of well-preserved space rocks that formed early in our solar system’s history and could help scientists understand how the planets formed and moved around before settling in their current configuration.

Download story graphics from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.

About Lucy:

Lucy’s principal investigator is based out of the Boulder, Colorado, branch of Southwest Research Institute, headquartered in San Antonio. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Lucy is the 13th mission in NASA’s Discovery Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information on NASA’s Lucy mission, visit:

By Lonnie Shekhtman

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

and

Katherine Kretke

Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.

Media Contacts:

Karen Fox / Molly Wasser

Headquarters, Washington
240-285-5155 / 240-419-1732
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov

Sarah Frazier

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
202-853-7191
sarah.frazier@nasa.gov

NASA has selected multiple small businesses for the Western Regional Multiple Award Construction Contract, which supports a broad range of facility enhancement, modernization, and sustainment work at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and other federal agencies in the region.

The contract provides general construction, modification, maintenance and repair, and demolition services, as well as new construction of buildings and facilities that incorporate Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design practices and building information modeling to support efficient and sustainable project execution.

The indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, firm-fixed-price contract is a follow-on to the agency’s previous regional construction contract and has a potential value of $450 million over a five‑year period.

Contract awardees are:

• Abide International Inc.
• Able Heating and Air Conditioning
• Anderson Burton Construction Inc.
• Anna Lisa Luna Construction
• Barkley Andross Corporation
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• Prime MIK JV LLC
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• Sergent Construction
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For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov

-end-

Jennifer Dooren / Jessica Taveau
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
jennifer.m.dooren@nasa.gov / jessica.c.taveau@nasa.gov

Dede Dinius
Armstrong Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif.
661-276-5701
darin.l.dinius@nasa.gov

The post NASA Awards Contract for Construction Services in California appeared first on NASA Science.

NASA has selected multiple small businesses for the Western Regional Multiple Award Construction Contract, which supports a broad range of facility enhancement, modernization, and sustainment work at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and other federal agencies in the region.

The contract provides general construction, modification, maintenance and repair, and demolition services, as well as new construction of buildings and facilities that incorporate Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design practices and building information modeling to support efficient and sustainable project execution.

The indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, firm-fixed-price contract is a follow-on to the agency’s previous regional construction contract and has a potential value of $450 million over a five‑year period.

Contract awardees are:

• Abide International Inc.
• Able Heating and Air Conditioning
• Anderson Burton Construction Inc.
• Anna Lisa Luna Construction
• Barkley Andross Corporation
• Bibro Construction Company Inc.
• CM Construction Services
• CMS Construction Inc.
• FASONE
• G‑1 Lead Builders JV LLC
• Gideon USA
• Good‑men Roofing & Construction Inc.
• Groundlevel Construction Inc.
• IPI Construction Inc.
• Innovative Project Solutions Inc.
• Ironwood Commercial Builders Inc.
• J.I. Garcia Construction Inc.
• JG Contracting
• Lead Builders Inc.
• Martinez Construction Services
• MX Construction Inc.
• OCS Construction Services Inc.
• Patricia I. Romero Inc., doing business as Pacific West Builders
• Gustav Keoni, doing business as Precision Construction
• Prime MIK JV LLC
• Spectrum Builders and Renovations Inc.
• Sea Pac Engineering Inc.
• Sergent Construction
• Souza Construction Inc.
• TLI Construction Inc.

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov

-end-

Jennifer Dooren / Jessica Taveau
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
jennifer.m.dooren@nasa.gov / jessica.c.taveau@nasa.gov

Dede Dinius
Armstrong Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif.
661-276-5701
darin.l.dinius@nasa.gov