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Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/08/16 09:26 CDT
Vesta's wacky craters
Dawn Journal: Dawn has arrived!
Posted by Marc Rayman on 2011/07/26 11:55 CDT
After covering 2.8 billion kilometers (1.7 billion miles) on its own, after traveling for nearly four years through the lonely emptiness of interplanetary space, after being bound by the gravity only of the sun, Dawn is finally in orbit around Vesta.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/05/11 12:23 CDT
It's hard to convey just how excited I am to see Dawn's first image of asteroid Vesta.
Why haven't we found evidence for life starting in asteroids?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/05/10 01:51 CDT
Here's a theoretical paper that asks an interesting question: When the solar system was very young and still very hot, could medium-sized asteroids have been habitable abodes for life?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/05/02 11:26 CDT
Space.com has taken advantage of the infinitely scrollable nature of Web pages to produce a really cool infographic on the scales of orbital distances in the solar system.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/26 05:56 CDT
Whenever we explore someplace new -- a new island, a new continent, a new cave, a new world -- there's a necessary activity that explorers must perform before they can sensibly tell the world about their discoveries: name things.
So far, no moons found at Ceres or Vesta
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/15 02:37 CDT
Since the Galileo mission discovered tiny Dactyl circling Ida in 1993, quite a lot of asteroid systems have been found to be binary; there are even a few triples. So it's quite reasonable to guess that two of the biggest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta, might also have satellites.
Welcome to Carnival of Space #191
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/05 11:25 CDT
Welcome, everyone, to the Planetary Society Blog for the 191st Carnival of Space! Every week, a different webmaster or blogger hosts the Carnival, showcasing articles written on the topic of space.
In honor of Stardust: The Annefrank encounter
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/24 04:32 CDT
Since Stardust is being decommissioned today I thought it'd be fitting to take a look back at one of its data sets. I hadn't fiddled with the Annefrank data set before, and it was small and easy to deal with.
LPSC 2011: Analysis of the grains returned by Hayabusa
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/16 12:39 CDT
I'd been despairing of finding a good source for a writeup of the presentations in the Hayabusa session at last week's Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, but am happy to report that I've finally found an excellent one.
LPSC 2011: Day 1: Small bodies
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/08 12:28 CST
Here are some of the noteworthy items from the morning's session on "Small Bodies: A Traverse from NEOs to TNOs" and the afternoon's session on "Asteroid Geophysics and Processes: Surfaces and Interiors."
A dog-bone-shaped asteroid's two moons: Kleopatra, Cleoselene, and Alexhelios
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/02/23 12:47 CST
Asteroid (216) Kleopatra has been interesting to astronomers for a long time because its brightness is highly variable, but it seems to get more interesting every time somebody looks at it with a new instrument. This week a paper was published in Icarus revealed that it's 30 to 50% empty space.
Close approach to Earth turns Apollo into Aten
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/02/08 12:49 CST
Last week we got buzzed by a very small asteroid, something that happens fairly often. But there were several details that made the close approach of asteroid 2011 CQ1 worthy of note.
How much is Vesta's geology controlled by its one huge impact feature?
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/02/07 02:09 CST
Here's a neat paper just published in Geophysical Research Letters: "Mega-ejecta on asteroid Vesta." In it, Martin Jutzi and Erik Asphaug consider Vesta's shape -- which appears to be dominated by a very large impact crater centered at its south pole -- and ask how much of the great big asteroid Vesta's global appearance is likely to be dominated by the effects of that one large impact.
Posted by Marc Rayman on 2011/02/03 12:10 CST
Dawn continues its flight through the asteroid belt, steadily heading toward its July rendezvous with Vesta, where it will take up residence for a year. On January 10, Dawn performed some of the activities that it will execute in its low altitude mapping orbit (LAMO) at Vesta.
2010 JL33: How to see an asteroid from quite a long way away
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/13 11:42 CST
A terrific set of Goldstone radar images of a good-sized near-Earth asteroids named 2010 JL33 was posted to the JPL website yesterday. They also posted a movie version but something about these pixelated radar image series absolutely begs for them to be displayed as an old-school animated GIF, so I made one.
ESA mission analyst suggests 2010 AL30 might be Venus Express rocket
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/01/13 10:30 CST
2010 AL30 zipped past us harmlessly about five hours ago. Because of its one-year orbital period, many people speculated it might be a manmade object, but 2010 AL30 might, in fact, be artificial.
Goldstone detects "STRONG" radar echoes from 2010 AL30
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/01/12 10:05 CST
Radio scientist Lance Benner posted to the Minor Planets Mailing list this evening the following message: "We have detected STRONG radar echoes from 2010 AL30 at Goldstone."
2010 AL30: Watch out for low-flying asteroids
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/01/12 11:52 CST
In less than 24 hours, a newly discovered asteroid known as 2010 AL30 will be zipping past Earth at an altitude of approximately a third the Earth-Moon distance. There's no chance it'll hit us, but it's generating a lot of excitement in the community of amateur and professional near-Earth asteroid observers.
Results from the Rosetta Encounter with Asteroid 2867 Steins
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/01/11 01:12 CST
Last week in Science magazine appeared the first peer-reviewed article on the results of Rosetta's September 2008 encounter with the smallish main-belt asteroid Steins. This morning I got a chance to sit down and read the article, and I wrote up a summary.
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