More cool images! As Dawn moves in on Ceres and prepares to enter orbit on March 6, it has managed to assemble enough images to produce a global map of the almost spheroid-shaped giant asteroid.
The bright spots however remain a mystery which cannot be answered until we get higher resolution images from much closer. Hopefully, Dawn will be able to do this once it is in orbit.
Link here.
What you might not know is that the moon is not the Earth’s only natural satellite. As recently as 1997, we discovered that another body, 3753 Cruithne, is what’s called a quasi-orbital satellite of Earth. This simply means that Cruithne doesn’t loop around the Earth in a nice ellipse in the same way as the moon, or indeed the artificial satellites we loft into orbit. Instead, Cruithne scuttles around the inner solar system in what’s called a “horseshoe” orbit.
Cool images! Dawn’s newest images have revealed that the brightest spot on Ceres, shown on the right in a cropped version of the full image, has a dimmer companion.
“Ceres’ bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin. This may be pointing to a volcano-like origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations,” said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The spots are still too small for Dawn’s camera to resolve. That they are inside what looks like a crater is very puzzling. If they are water-ice, why are they so bright and distinct? One one think the ice would pile up along the crater wall, but then, that’s what we think based on our experience here on Earth with wind, rain, and our heavy gravity. Ceres is cold, has no atmosphere, and a tiny gravitational field. Every geological process will proceed in a different manner.
Cool images! The Dawn science team has released new even sharper images of the giant asteroid Ceres, taken by Dawn on February 12 at a distance of 52,000 miles.
Though the surface appears to have many of the typical craters, scientists continue to be puzzled by the bright spots. This newest image suggests that they are ice-filled craters, but don’t hold me to that guess. For one thing, why are only a handful of craters filled with ice, and none of the others?
The uncertainty of science: The origin of the Chelyabinsk meteorite that crashed over that Russian city two years ago remains murky to scientists.
Originally, astronomers thought that the Chelyabinsk meteor came from a 1.24-mile-wide (2 kilometers) near-Earth asteroid called 1999 NC43. But a closer look at the asteroid’s orbit and likely mineral composition, gained from spectroscopy, suggests few similarities between it and the Russian meteor.
The scientists noted in their paper that you really can’t use the similarity of orbits to link different asteroids, as their orbits are chaotic and change too much.
In what might be a first for the planetary science/engineering community, an unmanned probe, being built to bring samples back from the asteroid Bennu, is turning out to be lighter than expected, thus allowing engineers to stuff its tanks with extra fuel to extend its mission.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, being built at a Lockheed Martin facility in Denver, is coming in lighter than the lift capability of the Atlas 5 rocket, which will lift off in its “411” configuration with a four-meter payload fairing, a single-engine Centaur upper stage, and one strap-on solid rocket booster.
The proposal — described as a “heavy launch option” — would add an extra 341 pounds of fuel to the spacecraft’s fuel tank.
Planetary probes never end up lighter than planned, at least until now. During construction scientists have always found it impossible to resist adding more instruments or capabilities, and thus engineers always struggle to get the spacecraft built within its weight budget. For OSIRIS-REx to have this wonderful problem is surely astonishing.
More cool images! Dawn has taken its best pictures yet of the solar system’s largest asteroid Ceres.
The image on the left is a computer enhanced version. They have also created an animation of the image sequence. All the images were taken on February 4 from about 90,000 miles distance.
Launched in December for a 2018 rendezvous with an asteroid, Hayabusa-2 has successfully completed its initial check-out according to Japanese officials.
Checkups on early-phase functionality are being carried out over a three-month period. Although the first Hayabusa had suffered malfunctions of its ion engines, it is confirmed that the four ion engines of Hayabusa-2 are functioning properly, JAXA said. Kuninaka said: “With the engines functioning, the explorer can set out on its voyage with a lot of leeway. I feel like, ‘Way to go!’”
Using 20 radar images of asteroid 2004 BL86 as it flew past Earth on January 26, scientists at JPL have created a movie showing the orbital motion of the asteroid’s moon.
The images also show one of the most spherical asteroids I have ever seen. Like Ceres, the larger size has helped shape the asteroid into a more typical-looking planetary sphere.
On Sunday Dawn took the best images ever of Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system.
The images are still somewhat fuzzy, as the spacecraft is still more than 140,000 miles away.
Radar images of the large asteroid 2004 BL86 as it flew past the Earth today have revealed that it has its own small moon.
The new images also show a second object positioned close to 2004 BL86. Benner told Space.com that the second object is a moon, with a diameter between 164 and 328 feet (50 and 100 m). Previous studies of the light around 2004 BL86 had already identified a moon orbiting the asteroid, and the new images confirm that discovery, he added. About 17 percent of asteroids in 2004 BL86’s size range have smaller objects trailing along with them.
Boulders and other small-scale features on the surface of the asteroid are coming into focus in the new images, as is the overall shape of the asteroid, according to Benner. He compared the object to another asteroid that made a close flyby of Earth six years ago, called 2008 EV5. It appears that 2004 BL86, like 2008 EV5, has an equatorial ridge around its middle, which makes it look “kind of like a muffin, or perhaps a top,” said Benner, who’s based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
This data is from radar data collected early in the fly-by, so we should expect even more details to come out in the next day or so.
Some data produced by Dawn while it was in orbit around the asteroid Vesta have suggested to some scientists that liquid water might have helped create a handful of the surface features on the asteroid.
The theory is interesting and might be true. I also wouldn’t bet a lot of money on it, because this interpretation of the data is somewhat tentative and based on a lot of assumptions.
Getting closer! Scientists for the space probe Dawn have released new images of Ceres, the solar system’s largest asteroid.
Some of the images have been combined to produce a very short movie showing the asteroid’s rotation. The images also show that unlike Vesta, Dawn’s previous target, Ceres appears very spherical, like a planet.
On January 26 asteroid 2004 BL86, about 1/3 of a mile in diameter, will fly past Earth at a distance of about 745,000 miles.
This is the largest known asteroid expected to come this close until 2027.
The uncertainty of science: Fused droplets found in many places across the globe and theorized to have come from a comet major impact that caused a major climate change around 13,000 years ago have now been found to have instead come from common house fires.
Since the 1970s when the Walter Alvarez found evidence of an asteroid impact in the Yucatan that could have caused the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago, planetary scientists have seen asteroid or comet impacts everywhere. After all, impacts are cool disasters that play well to television producers and funding agencies.
Read this story however. It describes some very solid scientific work that wipes out one one of those cool theories, replacing it with something quite mundane.
Data from Rosetta of Comet 67P/C-G strongly suggests that the origin of the comets of its class come from a wide range of locations within the early solar system, and that many of these comets might not have delivered the water to Earth as previously believed.
The data also suggests that the Earth’s water came more from asteroids, not comets, something that scientists had not expected.
When Japan launched Hayabusa-2 last week it also sent a secondary payload towards the asteroid, a cubesat designed to test the engineering of using minisats for future planetary missions.
PROCYON, which stands for PRoximate Object Close flYby with Optical Navigation, is a 65-kg (143 lb.) spacecraft designed to demonstrate that micro-satellites can be used for deep-space exploration. In addition to testing out micro-sat systems in deep space, the spacecraft is to conduct a close flyby of an asteroid. Developed by the University of Tokyo and JAXA, PROCYON was launched as a secondary payload along with Hayabusa2 on Dec. 3. JAXA reports that controllers have received confirmation that PROCYON was inserted into its planned interplanetary orbit as scheduled two hours after launch.
The spacecraft, which measures only 630 x 550 x 550 mm (24.8 x 21.65 x 21.65 in), has a mission that is divided into nominal and advanced phases.
If this engineering proves viable, which we have every reason to expect, it will open the door to many more planetary missions, costing far less and requiring much smaller rockets to launch.
Japan’s new asteroid probe, Hayabusa-2, was successfully launched today.
The spacecraft carries four mini-rovers and is also designed to bring a sample back to Earth.
Further reports indicate that all is going well and that the solar panels have deployed as scheduled.
Delayed due to weather twice, the launch of Japan’s Hayabusa-2 asteroid probe has now been scheduled for Wednesday.
This probe comes with four mini-rovers and an impactor!
Hayabusa 2’s target is a 1km-wide asteroid labelled 1999 JU3, after the year when it was discovered. It is a C-type asteroid, thought to contain more organic material than other asteroids, and so might again help scientists understand how the Solar System evolved.
The Japanese space agency JAXA intend for Hayabusa 2 to catch up with asteroid 1999 JU3 in 2018. It will land a small cube-shaped probe called MASCOT (Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout) developed by the German Space Agency (DLR) together with French space partners the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES). The lander is able to move its centre of gravity so that it can tip itself over in order to move across the asteroid’s surface. The three small rovers, called Minerva-II, will also roam the asteroid, gathering data. Hayabusa 2 also carries an impactor that will blast a 2-metre-wide crater in the asteroid’s surface, which will allow the spacecraft to collect fragments and bring them home for study in the laboratory. The spacecraft itself is designed to touch down briefly three times to gather samples.
New data suggests that when a large impact hit Vesta’s Rheasilvia basin sometime in the past, the entire asteroid was shaken up, producing ripples that eventually surfaced as the giant grooves that circle the asteroid’s equator.
“Vesta got hammered,” said Peter Schultz, professor of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown and the paper’s senior author. “The whole interior was reverberating, and what we see on the surface is the manifestation of what happened in the interior.”
The research suggests that the Rheasilvia basin on Vesta’s south pole was created by an impactor that came in at an angle, rather than straight on. But that glancing blow still did an almost unimaginable amount of damage. The study shows that just seconds after the collision, rocks deep inside the asteroid began to crack and crumble under the stress. Within two minutes major faults reached near the surface, forming deep the canyons seen today near Vesta’s equator, far from the impact point.
Essentially, for a very very short period of time, immediately after the impact, the solid material of the asteroid acted more like a liquid, producing ripples that immediately settled down as the solid deep equatorial grooves we see today.
