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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...
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/pictures/kleopatra/
IANAA (I am not an astronomer) but the technique they described was more than passive telescopy. Instead of looking really hard they bounced radar waves off the thing. This would require a lot of processing power to decode and a lot of signal strength to receive. Also, it mentions that the telescope was recently upgraded to be able to image distant objects.
Try reading the article instead of trying to get an early post.
--Shoeboy
(former microserf)
I think it is an important discovery, not necessarily the asteroid, the radar imaging technique. I'm pretty impressed that they could do this with a _ground_based_ radar dish. That is completely amazing. 135 miles long may seem big but this thing is 200 million miles away. That kind of imaging quality from a single dish is almost unheard of.
Secondly, this is an interesting discovery since a lot can be guessed about how this thing formed from its shape. Femur shaped asteroids would have to be formed by stretching the material while it was cooling. Maybe a molten lump of material flew past a bigger asteroid and got pulled apart, then managed to cool without going back into a ball.
Let's hope it's not Earth shattering. If this was on a collision course with us, we'd all have to move...
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!
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.
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
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.
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