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First Ever Radar Images Of Main-Belt Asteroid
Phrogman writes: "NASA and astronomers at Cornell have collected the first ever radar images of a main-belt asteroid, a metallic, dog-bone shaped rock the size of New Jersey named Asteroid 216 Kleopatra. There is an article here with more information and a small image."
Can they run linux on that satellite? Maybe all the asteroids could be combined into a beowulf cluster/planet. are these open source images? What about DeCSS? Metallica's lawyers haven't reviewed this yet but they think you violated their copyright in some way...
And turn that into the international space station. 135 miles long... Lots of space =-]
Firs question: Why are we just now getting radar images of these asteroids? Too much debris? Or are the asteroids too small to be able to record until now (arecibo)?
Second question: Is this really that important of a discovery?
Nothing really earth-shattering here..move along.
~Steve
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~Steve
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"<r-xr-xr-x> Just try to edit me" -- www.ircnews.com
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/kleopatra/
If the bone is of the size of New Jersey, imagine the size of the dog!! Let's just hope that if cosmic dog ever comes, big puppy won't wanna play with the big blue ball...
And MSNBC gets the award for stupidest headline with their report on this story, entitled 'Telescope spots huge space bone'.
Was it wrong that it took me five minutes to stop laughing at this?
-Mad Dreamer
Earth is a planet
(/Serious post)
Well anyways looking at the picture ... a dog bone THAT big had to take one helluva arm to throw ... I mean imagine the size of the dog ... would the earth be the size of a large beach ball in comparison?
Guess you'd have to know the size of the dog first ... lets say it's a great dane (erm GALATICAL great dane rather). And it's name is Super Spot.
Now if you were Super Spot wouldn't it piss you off to have to run from universe to universe to run after this thing? I mean heck I dun even like to run period, let alone at like warp 8 ...
Let's consider there really is no dog that is bigger than jupiter (Really going out on a limb here). Then let's consider someone really likes to write with HEAVY sarcasm. And this person makes really NO sense and mentally notes the joke is going no where ....
erm ... I'm done now :-)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Reasons to choose Kassandra 216 over New Jersey: 1. The air is better for you. We may not have any, but at least it isn't a carcinogen! 2. Fewer pissed off commuters. You need more than a rusted out El Camino to make it here! 3. No chance of seeing Hillary Clinton on the Channel 3 news. 200 million miles precludes seeing any network television at all!! 4. We have only the finest quality low G accomidations! Well, since we have the ONLY low G accomidations.. 5. Tell your grandkids about it! "When I was your age, we had to hop a leaky Russian capsule for four years, then we had to eat a lump of dry poison." 6. Complimentary Continental breakfast for the first 100 visitors!
.sig: Now legally binding!
Once radar was resolved, the LAPD sprang into action and pulled the asteroid over for speeding and gave it some of their famous oldfashioned-loving with a 25-mile billy club. :-)
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
The official release is here:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releas es/2000/kleopatra.html
Another picture and an animation of the asteroid are here:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/kleopa tra/
Brief, yes. Useful, perhaps.
Yet Another Not-So-Witty Quip Regarding Bone-Shaped Asteroid:
Say, isn't that the crusted-over remains of the Discovery?
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wcb
dateline 1:32am (EDT). According to observers stationed on the George Washington Bridge, a dog-shaped Egytian hieroglyph decended slowly over Fort Lee tonight, neatly locking itself on top of the former state of New Jersey.
"It was the darndest thing I ever saw," said one distant relative of Elian Gonsalez, who identified himself only as "Mark Anthony." "A dog-like figure came down at exit 68, then a cat a 70, a dancing girl with braids at 71, and then whoosh, all of Jersey was covered, in one big farting sound!"
Officials in the Guiliani administration did not return our requests for comment, but insiders in City goverment have informed us that the Major intends to reveal that is a direct descendent of Caesar at a press conference tomorrow, as well as that he called on Kleopatra to help him initiate his new "Clean Up New York -- and the rest of the World!" campaign. "In one fell swoop, he's eliminated the armpit of America -- no more chemical dumps, no more girls with big hair and nasal lisps. And wait 'till you see what he has planned for Connecticut."
In other News, officials at zoos in New York City and Long Island today reported a series of lion disappearances...
Click below for proof:
"asteroid"
Satellite of Love (of MST3K fame)
This site at
JPL</a> has more information on imaging asteroids
with radar. This has only become practical
relatively recently with newly installed equipment
at Arecibo and (to a lesser extent) NASA's
Goldstone radar telescope.
It looks like asteroids come in two shapes: "long
and thin" (a la the "dog bone" Kleopatra or "shoe"
Eros), or the more classic lumpy-round-thing look.
They seem to be about equally common, at least
among the asteroids we've imaged.
I think game designers and movie special-effects
people may need to make some revisions! But what
radio telescopes can't tell us is what happens to
a long-thin asteroid when you blast it; does it
turn into smaller long-thin rocks, or fragment
into roughly spherical chunks? I demand accuracy
in my arcade games!
This is really interesting stuff to me because of a couple of things that radar measurements can do that optical either can't or has difficulty doing.
1) Radar can penetrate clouds. Witness Magellan.
2) Since radar can do this, ground based radar doesn't suffer nearly as much atmospheric distortion as a normal telescope does.
3) Radar is an active system, so a radar observer does not have to worry about reflected sunlight providing illumination.
4) Radar observations can easily provide lots of info like rotation rate, etc. See here for examples.
5) Radar can also, given sufficient info, provde 3D maps. For an optical 3D map, you either need a laser altimeter or a stereo imager
Also check out this quote from a NASA press release about radar imaging of asteroid 1999 JM8:
""Our finest resolution is 15 meters (49 feet) per pixel, which is finer than that obtained for any other asteroid, even for spacecraft" said Dr. Jean-Luc Margot, one of the team members from Arecibo Observatory. "To get that kind of resolution with an optical telescope, you'd need a mirror several hundred meters across. Radar certainly is the least expensive way of imaging Earth-approaching objects.""
Certainly seems to me that radar is a very useful tool for observing near-Earth and even belt asteroids which could lead to later exploration and exploitation.
"There is no shot you can take that I cannot simply deny." - Ertai, wizard goalie
I'm serious. We should hollow some asteroids out and make a kick-ass space station.
Solar power out there is about as good as on the surface of the Earth. Enough of it and we could melt some holes. Heck, by then we may have better nuclear power like a working cold or warm fusion.
Even an M type asteroid has some silicates in it, so that's where we get the oxygen, if we don't get it from an ice asteroid. Carbon is easy, we have too much of it in Earth's atmosphere anyway, CO + O2 makes an OK rocket fuel. We just take extra fuel along and have fuel cells producing CO2 for our plant life. Humans don't really need all that much nitrogen, just for amino acids and some less reactive component of the atmosphere. It doesn't take much.
I'm not proposing hollowing the ENTIRE thing out, just start hollowing... We'd have to pick a good spot, but that thing has thousands of miles of surface area. I'd worry about digging in and finding radioactive metals, I wouldn't want to build a colony near any uranium deposits.
It sure sounds like good thing to do in the 21st century. What else is there to do?
The astronomers used the telescope to bounce radar signals off Kleopatra. With sophisticated computer-analysis techniques, they decoded the echoes, transformed them into images, and assembled a computer model of the asteroid's shape. The Arecibo telescope underwent major upgrades in the 1990s, which dramatically improved its sensitivity and made it feasible to image more distant objects. These new radar images were obtained when Kleopatra was about 106 million miles (171 million kilometers) from Earth. Travelling at the speed of light, the transmitted signal took about 19 minutes to make the round trip to Kleopatra and back. "Getting images of Kleopatra from Arecibo was like using a Los Angeles telescope the size of the human eye's lens to image a car in New York," Ostro said. From the article at JPL. Sounds fun--apologies if my link is broken, I'm still messing around with this.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
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Here's my mirror
Seriously, when do they send a couple of big ol' shuttles up there and convert this useless space rock into valuable space station materials?
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
- Find a solid metal asteroid.
- Drill a hole down the length of it.
- Fill the hole with water.
- Plug the hole.
- Slowly heat the asteroid with solar mirrors.
- Eventually, the metal will be very plastic but not yet molten. At some point, the heat will reach the water.
- The water will boil, and the expanding steam will force the metal to expand like a balloon.
- If you were lucky, you'd end up with a very large metal ball-shaped shell. POOF! Space Station!
- Patch leaks.
- Pump full of atmosphere.
- Move in.
Yes, there's be lots of engineering challenges, but it's still a neat idea....phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Anyone know of more giant hollow asteroid stories?
Larry Niven discusses hollowed asteroids at great length in the Known Space series, particularly the Belter stories.
Oh yeah, and in Protector the Brennan Monster has hollows in his asteroid, IIRC.
Then Niven and Pournelle's The Mote In God's Eye talks about old hollowed out asteroids, filed with mummified Moties.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series talks about hollowing out Phobos, which may have been an asteroid at one time before it was captured by Mars.
Arthur C. Clarke's Earthlight is about a war between Earth and the other planets, I think they mention asteroids in it.
Bester's The Stars My Destination has Joseph and the Scientific People holed up in some sort of asteroid.
George
Remember when the ape throws the bone into the
air and it changes into a spaceship?
Well thats the bone!
Note also that no actual photos are available - just computer reconstructions of radar echoes.
Suspending disbelief for a moment, this could as well be a generation-type starship... drive at one end, cargo/living space at the other end, a narrower structure holding both apart. And, of course, this would show up on radar as hollow spaces, smaller metallic "fragments", a metallic skin, and patterns which would be misinterpreted as "fractured" by anyone convinced that this must be a naturally-formed object.
It's quite obviously the bone thrown up into space at the beginning of 2001!
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
The shuttle can't go above 300 km altitude or so, let along to the asteroid belt.
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Did anyone else boggle at the thought that this sucker is 135 miles long & 58 miles wide, and mainly METAL? Would it be cost effective to go mine this sucker?