Resolved Color of Main-Belt Asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson as seen by NASA’s Lucy Mission

Introduction: On the 20th of April 2025, NASA’s Lucy mission [1] flew by the C-type main-belt asteroid (52246) Donaldjohanson (hereafter DJ). The encounter’s goal was to test the spacecraft and instruments during an observation sequence commensurate with those to be used on Lucy’s main targets – Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. Data returned from the panchromatic Lucy LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI, 450-850 nm, [2]) during this testing sequence reveal the asteroid to be bi-lobed and elongated shape (Fig. 1).

DJ is a member of the Erigone collisional family, named after the parent body asteroid (163) Erigone (see references in [3]). Ground-based color observations (Fig. 2) show it to decrease in color towards shorter wavelengths, possibly due to the presence of hydrated materials [4].

In this work, we present an analysis of color images taken by Lucy’s Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). MVIC consists of six time delay integration (TDI) charge-coupled devices (CCDs). TDI works by synchronizing the transfer rate of the image between CCD rows and the relative motion of the instrument allowing a high signal to noise image to be built up even for fast scans. It covers wavelengths between 375 nm and 950 nm using five color filters and a panchromatic one (see Table 1).

Color Analysis: We focus our analysis on images acquired with the four wide band filters: violet, green, orange and near-IR. Our results will provide resolved color variations and contextualise DJ’s color with respect to ground-based observations of DJ, Erigone (Fig. 2), other members of the Erigone family, and the broader asteroid and small body populations.

Filter	Wavelength
Violet	375-480
Green	480-520
Orange	520-625
Phyllosilicate	625-750
Near-IR	750-950
Panchromatic	350-950

Table 1 – MVIC filters [5]

Figure 1 – (52246) Donaldjohanson as seen by the panchromatic Lucy L’LORRI instrument, taken on April 20, 2025 at 17:51 UTC.

 

 Figure 2 – Ground-based normalized (at 0.55 µm) visible spectrum of DJ (blue) acquired with the Gran Telescopio Canarias compared to the Bus-DeMeo’s Cg-type (black) and the mean spectrum of the C-type members within the Erigone family (grey). Taken from [6].

 Acknowledgments: The Lucy mission is funded through the NASA Discovery program on contract No. NNM16AA08C.

References: [1] Levison et al. (2021) PSJ 2, 171. [2] Weaver et al. (2023), SSR 219, 82. [3] Marchi et al., (2025) PSJ 6, 59. [4] Vilas (1995) Icarus 115, 217-218. [5] Reuter et al. (2023), SSR 219, 69. [6] Souza-Feliciano et al. (2020), Icarus 338, 113463.