SPACE ODDITY

SCIENTISTS have flown a spacecraft by an "odd" eight kilometre long asteroid.

- 

Nasa's Lucy space probe passed approximately 960 kilometres by the asteroid Donaldjohanson on Sunday.

The bizarrely shaped object has been compared to a lumpy bowling pin by space watchers.

The space rock is so large that Lucy could not capture its entirety in its first set of images beamed back to Earth.

It will take up to a week to downlink the remainder of the encounter data from the spacecraft, which should give a more complete picture of the asteroid's overall shape. Donaldjohanson is approximately 225 million kilometres away.