Space and Astronomy News for the 26th of April 2025

NASA's Lucy spacecraft has an encounter with a strange object: say g'day to Asteroid Donaldjohanson

This week, the spacecraft Lucy made its second close up observation of an asteroid. 

Astronomers had observed asteroid Donaldjohanson as having quite a variable brightness and was thought to be a contact binary - two asteroids touching each other. 

Image via: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab

They were surprised to find Donaldjohanson is not just two asteroids, but also has a connecting bridge between them. This is the second close up view of asteroids Lucy has produced on the way to its main target, the Jupiter Trojan asteroid Eurybates, in August 2027. Asteroids are seen as ideal ways to study the formation of the environment surrounding the Sun.

“These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,” said Tom Statler, program scientist for the Lucy mission at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense.”

Read more here.

35 years since Hubble was launched

This week the HST (Hubble Space Telescope) celebrated 35 years since its launch.  After a troubled start due to flawed optics that required a daring fix in space, Hubble has churned out a stream of science results and images that have changed our view of the Universe and delighted us folks here on planet Earth. 

NASA has produced a wonderful online gallery here as well as this YouTube video of Hubble highlights. 

If you can, well worth a watch on a big screen TV. It's also worth remembering that Hubble was launched a little while before the web was generally available to the public!

The world's largest Solar Telescope receives a major upgrade

Many of our customers have been taking detailed images of the Sun during the current Solar Maximum using a variety of gear from Lunt, Sky-Watcher and Vaonis.

At the other end of the scale, the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii has received a new camera after a 15 year development process.

Inouye Solar Telescope 

The new instrument is the Visible Tunable Filtergraph (VTF) and is now producing images of the Sun with more detail than has ever been seen previously.

The first image take with the VTF. Further enhancements will reveal further details.  If you'd like to see this in more detail, click here for a high resolution image - each pixel in it is about 10km across!

The VFT was developed in Germany and you can read more about it here.

Say farewell to Mars for a little while

The view from Sydney around 7.30pm local time on the 27th of April 2025 facing north west.  Mars will appear as a bright red star low on the horizon.

Mars is now low in the early evening sky and will disappear into the glow of the setting Sun shortly. This and the next few weekends will be your last chance to observe Mars until it returns to our pre-dawn skies.  

Cheers,

Earl White

BINTEL

26th April 2025