From Afar to Olduvai: asteroid Donaldjohanson's landmarks get names tied to human origins

The geological features of an oddly shaped asteroid visited by NASA's Lucy spacecraft now have official names, and like the mission's moniker, they reflect a focus on early human relatives.

Lucy flew by the asteroid, dubbed 52246 Donaldjohanson, on April 20, and the names of the spacecraft and asteroid were far from coincidental. The asteroid is named after Donald Johanson, the American paleoanthropologist who discovered "Lucy," a now-famous partial skeleton of the hominin Australopithecus afarensis that inspired the Lucy mission's name. Lucy the hominin got her name from the 1967 Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," which Johanson heard in the camp on the night he discovered parts of the 3.18 million-year-old skeleton in 1974.

Now, scientists have named the features of asteroid Donaldjohanson, and the names have been approved by the International Astronomical Union, the official arbitrator of names in astronomy.

Related: See asteroid Donaldjohanson up close thanks to NASA's Lucy mission

The asteroid's two lobes have been named after geographical regions related to hominin discoveries. The smaller lobe is called Afar, after the Afar Triangle region of Hadar, Ethiopia, where the Lucy skeleton was found. The larger lobe is named after Olduvai, a significant river gorge in Tanzania where many other hominin fossils have been discovered.

The asteroid's neck, or "collum," — which joins the two lobes — has been named Windover. The name comes from the Windover Archaeological Site, which is near Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where the Lucy spacecraft launched in 2021.

"Human remains and artifacts recovered from that site revolutionized our understanding of the people who lived in Florida around 7,300 years ago," NASA officials said in a statement.

Also on the asteroid's neck are two smooth areas. One such "regio" is named Hadar, after the site where the Lucy fossil was found. The other area is called Minatogawa, after the Okinawa region where Japan's oldest known hominins were discovered.

In addition, notable fossil names have been assigned to "select boulders and craters on Donaldjohanson," NASA officials said in the statement.

These names appear to be Boxgrove Saxum, Cashel Saxum, Kennewick Saxum, Luzia Dorsum, Mungo (a crater) and Narmada (another crater), according to the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature, a service from the U.S. Geological Survey that posted all of the IAU-approved names to date for Donaldjohanson. (In Latin, "dorsum" means something like "the ridge," and "saxum" translates to "a large stone" or "boulder.")

The Lucy spacecraft swung by asteroid Donaldjohanson to practice for its main mission: to use its science instruments to probe space rocks known as Trojans. Trojan asteroids share Jupiter's orbit and are named after the ancient city of Troy.

The aims of the Donaldjohanson flyby included taking pictures of features on the asteroid, which is located between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt. As of Sept. 9, the Lucy spacecraft was roughly 300 million miles (480 million kilometers) from the sun, according to NASA. It is en route to its next encounter with the Trojan asteroid Eurybates (which takes its name from Homer's work), which is expected in August 2027.