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."

Comments

A big duh...

[MadDreamer]

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

Tourism

[technos]

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!

Why?

[Ertai]

A number of people have posted comments to the effect of "who cares?", "this isn't important".

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.