Welcome to Cool Stuff Ride Home, where we bring you some of the more intriguing stories from around the world.

I'm Marcus Papp, alongside Reggie Rizzou. On today's episode, the satellite Lucy shares intel on the asteroid Donald Johnson while on its way to Jupiter,

and some released pheasants may be causing a tick problem. On this day in history, Thor hired all sets sail on his raft,

the Contiki seeking to challenge our belief of Polynesian origin.

That's coming up on cool stuff.

NASA's Lucy spacecraft has just sent back new images of a peculiar space rock

during its second asteroid flyby,

offering an early glimpse of the complex structure scientists hope will reveal secrets about

the early solar system. It was on Sunday that Lucy zoomed past the asteroid Donald Johnson,

you heard that right, the asteroid's name is Donald Johnson, at a staggering 30,000 miles per hour,

passing within 600 miles of the object, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and

Jupiter. Now, if you're wondering why the asteroid was named Donald Johnson, well, it was

named after the paleo-anthropologists who discovered the famous Lucy fossil in Ethiopia 50 years ago.

Now, the asteroid is an oddly shaped, long, lumpy asteroid, described as looking like a peanut

or maybe in an irregular shape bowling pin.

The spacecraft's high-resolution long-range reconnaissance imager captured photos during the encounter,

although the asteroid was so large

that it didn't fully fit in a single frame. Scientists estimate the asteroid is about five miles long

and two miles wide at its widest point, larger than they initially expected. After studying the

images, researchers confirm that Donald Johnson likely formed from the collision

of two smaller space rocks about 150 million years ago, making it another example of a contact

binary, like Deaconish, the first asteroid Lucy encountered in 2023. Per Hal Levison, principal

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