Asteroid Braille

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Deep Space 1 flew by asteroid 9969 Braille on July 28, 1999, at an altitude of only 26 kilometers. However, the only images of Braille were captured from much farther away, about 14,000 kilometers.

NASA / JPL / Ted Stryk

Braille proved to be an irregularly shaped body about 2.2 kilometers long by 0.6 kilometers across. It is probably a Q-type asteroid, dominated by olivine and pyroxene. It is also unusually bright for an asteroid, with an albedo of about 0.34.

Copyright holder: Ted Stryk

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 June 28, 1999