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Views of the Asteroid Toutatis, From Earth As Well As Close-Up
When Chinese probe Chang'e buzzed the asteroid Toutatis, it wasn't the only one watching. NASA's observatory in Goldstone, CA was taking radar images, which have now been assembled into a short (40-second) animation.
The craft was recording the encounter, too, as reported by Sky & Telescope, which also gives a good summary of the history behind Chang'e's mission.
Resolution really helps things...
It turned the face on Mars into a collection of rocks.
And more importantly... Porn pictures on computers are no longer fuzzy 16 color images resembling the naked form.. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Is it just me, or do the newer batch of asteroids resemble big poops? Back in my day, they resembled little moons. And get off my lawn!
My first thought was, "That looks like one ugly, badly grown potato!"
I doubt any asteroid will be found rotating around its long axis though.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Is it just me, or do the newer batch of asteroids resemble big poops? Back in my day, they resembled little moons. And get off my lawn!
The smaller the asteroid, the less moony and the more poopy it looks, and all the substantially moony have already been found.
Planetology also predicts that any sufficiently large poop becomes spherical and develops internal structure. Keep that in mind and don't forget to clean your back-in-my-days outhouse regularly!
Ezekiel 23:20
According to yahoo news it is huge and Sky & Telescope says it is little. :)
Thumbs up for the chineese. As much as I don't like their politcs & government, I am really happy that they will hopefully start a new space race. All the humanity will benefit from that.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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That gave me a little thrill. That's one of the building blocks of the future, folks, literally!
Back in my day, they resembled little moons.
That's no moon.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
The radar images are great, but they're definitely not conventional photos - the viewpoint-from-Earth is actually from the 'top' of the image, looking down. They're constructed from a combination of distance measurements and Doppler shifts, the latter thanks to the rotation of the asteroid.
So basically it means a single transmitter and single receiver can figure out a two-dimensional image from a vast distance - and it's nice that these images quite closely match the conventional, optical images taken by the Chang'e probe!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Why? Are you suggestion that precession (in an astronomical sense) doesn't affect asteroids just like any other large space object...?
In fact, that one small village that still holds out against the invaders, would all get a few goose-bumps from having an asteroid named after their favourite god.
I have to assume that there's also a asteroid named Belenos and one named Belisima. Fun times reading those books - and now my kids love them. Thanks for bringing up the memories Slashdot.
Especially if your mooning and pooping on my lawn.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Umm, any rotating object spins around exactly one axis unless/until it's acted upon by some force (impact, gas jet, tidal influence, etc) that changes that axis. Now perhaps asteroids typically don't rotate around an axis that aligns nicely with the ecliptic plane since their angular momentum is likely influenced more by impacts than the net rotational inertia during formation, but any given asteroid still rotates around one well-defined axis.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.