Asteroids and comets visited by spacecraft as of December 2012, in color, excepting Vesta

Filed under best of, pretty pictures, many worlds, amateur image processing, scale comparisons, presentation slides, asteroids, comets, near-Earth asteroids, asteroid 21 Lutetia, asteroid 243 Ida and Dactyl, asteroid 25143 Itokawa, asteroid 253 Mathilde, asteroid 2867 Steins, asteroid 433 Eros, asteroid 951 Gaspra, comet Borrelly, comet Halley, comet Hartley 2, comet Tempel 1, comet Wild 2, Chang'E program, Galileo, comet Halley armada, Deep Space 1, NEAR, Deep Impact, Stardust, Hayabusa (MUSES-C), Rosetta and Philae

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Asteroids and comets visited by spacecraft as of December 2012, in color, excepting Vesta

A montage of 16 of the 17 asteroids and comets that have been photographed up close as of December 2012, when Chang'E 2 flew past Toutatis. This version is in color and shows the bodies at their correct relative (though not absolute) albedo or brightness. Not included is Vesta, which would cover an area about three times the width and height of this montage.

Montage by Emily Lakdawalla. Data from NASA / JPL / JHUAPL / UMD / JAXA / ESA / OSIRIS team / Russian Academy of Sciences / China National Space Agency. Processed by Emily Lakdawalla, Daniel Machacek, Ted Stryk, Gordan Ugarkovic.

The "click to enlarge" version has a resolution of 100 meters per pixel. Here is a version at 20 meters per pixel.

Below is another version of the same montage, except that the albedo is linearly scaled, meaning that Borrelly (with an albedo of 0.03) really is ten dimes darker than Steins (albedo 0.34). (Also available at 20 m/pixel)

All asteroids and comets visited by spacecraft as of December 2012, in color, albedo linearly scaled

Color images were not actually available for all bodies. There have been color images of Lutetia, Ida, Dactyl, Itokawa, Steins, Toutatis, Gaspra, Eros, Mathilde, Tempel 1, and Hartley 2. The others, including Braille, Annefrank, Halley, Borrelly, and Wild 2, were given a brown color to match the others.

Albedoes used for the composite:

Itokawa: 0.53
Steins: 0.34
Braille: 0.34
Eros: 0.25
Ida: 0.23
Dactyl: 0.23
Gaspra: 0.22
Annefrank: 0.21
Lutetia: 0.19
Toutatis: 0.13
Mathilde: 0.0436
Halley: 0.04
Tempel 1: 0.04
Borrelly: 0.03
Wild 2: 0.03
Hartley 2: 0.028

Copyright holder: Ted Stryk

Copyright holder: Daniel Macháček

Copyright holder: Emily Lakdawalla

Copyright holder: Gordan Ugarkovic

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about December 13, 2012