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.
