The Planetary Society Blog
By Emily Lakdawalla
Rosetta Unearths a "Jewel of the Solar System"
Sep. 9, 2008 | 15:51 PDT | 22:51 UTC
I have finally managed to write up my notes from the way-too-early-Saturday-morning press conference on the first results of Rosetta's encounter with asteroid Šteins, giving you all of the information I could write down on the first science results. I'm sorry I'm late with this because I felt that the mainstream media coverage of this event was particularly poor, focusing too much on the negative -- the fact that the sharpest camera went into safe mode near closest approach, robbing us of what might have been much better images -- and not enough on the cool images and other information that did hit the ground. Anyway, go read the story to find out Rosetta's first impressions of Šteins.
For the story, I managed to convert the video that ESA released into a much more bandwidth-friendly animated GIF version, shown below; and below that is the same data, only this time I separated it out into its separate frames. OSIRIS WAC view of Steins flyby
The wide-angle camera on Rosetta snapped photos of Steins throughout its 800-kilometer flyby on September 6, 2008. The animation begins three minutes before closest approach, from a distance of about 2,000 kilometers, and ends four minutes after closest approach. At the start of the animation, the Sun illuminated the asteroid from directly behind the spacecraft, so no shadows are visible on its surface, which shines brilliantly. As the flyby continued, the spacecraft viewed it from increasingly higher phase angles, making the asteroid appear darker and bringing more surface features into view through topographic shading. The asteroid is about 5.9 kilometers across and 4.0 kilometers from top to bottom. Credit: ESA ©2007 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / RSSD / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA |
Steins as seen by RosettaThese images of asteroid (2867) Steins were captured during the seven minutes surrounding Rosetta's approach to within 800 kilometers of the asteroid on September 5, 2008. Credit: ESA ©2007 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / RSSD / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA / montage by Emily Lakdawalla |
Finally, a comment on pronunciation. Apparently asteroid 2867 Šteins is named for a Latvian astronomer. I am told by several members of unmannedspaceflight.com who have eastern European cred that he would have pronounced his name something like "Shtainss." I've heard most people pronounce it like the plural of the beer mug, "Stinez," and one person (the Rosetta project scientist, Rita Schultz, who is German), like a combination of these, "Shtinez." I'm still planning on talking about this encounter during tomorrow's Ustream chat and now am not sure how to pronounce it. Will it be ridiculous for me to attempt its original pronunciation? Should I just go with the flow and pronounce it like the beer mug? Hmmm...
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