Probe Nearing Vesta

[Mysterion]

Can't believe there's not a thread about this yet, so:

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-spacecraft-orbiting-massive-asteroid-213732892.html

Not all the way there, yet, but getting some great pictures.

(Bonus Trivia: Isaac Asimov's first published story was called Marooned Off Vesta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_Off_Vesta)!)

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Since the article lacks anything worth calling a picture, here's the archive of all photos of the Dawn mission. This is incredibly awesome, they are literally digging through the early pieces of what was going to become a planet, like a preserved snapshot of a part of the solar system formation. Even forgetting the science that is going to be done, that's still cool.

I'm more excited about Ceres though. It's a dwarf planet, actually the first one that we will visit, it is "icy", and it... well... I think it will look better. If you're not a geologist, Vesta is just one big rock. Though the main reason I'm excited about it is that the moons and dwarf planets in other star systems are likely to harbour civilizations, and visiting the moons and the dwarf planets give our imagination new ideas about how these unreachable places might look like, or how they might have looked like before life changed them. I know that's a silly reason in itself, but I wish we would explore all dwarf planets and major moons, and explore them more.

 

[B.J.]

Anybody happen to know if those pictures are shown in full color? It's difficult to tell, and it doesn't say either way on the site.

 

[Lindley]

Anybody happen to know if those pictures are shown in full color? It's difficult to tell, and it doesn't say either way on the site.

Probably not. It takes more bandwidth to send back color images, and the resolution on the sensor is usually a bit lower with color as well. Color cameras are great for PR, not always so beneficial for science.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

The pictures I checked are all greyscale, there's no any kind of colouration in any of them. The captions say that the surface is grey, so the surface would probably look the same way in a colour image though. Otherwise, the captions are misleading.

That said, light from different spectra is certainly useful for science, so at least false colour images are beneficial, they have 7 narrowband filters up there, and there's also an imaging spectrometer that can take images with much more colour/spectral information than a "regular" colour image.

They could have easily taken the pictures with all narrowband filters, couldn't they? They took time to create a 3D image, so they could have done a colour one too. They were probably in a hurry to download the first ones, and they have other tasks to perform right now, but still.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

There's a new detailed photo:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA14317 (got it from http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110802.html )

The first think that one would notice is that huge alien landing base.