Galileo's images of Gaspra

Written by
Emily Lakdawalla
March 1, 2013
Last week I posted all the images that Galileo ever took of asteroid Ida and its surprise satellite Dactyl. This week, I'm giving you every image that Galileo took of Gaspra. Gaspra was Galileo's first asteroid encounter, and there were a lot of images commanded that were pointed at black space. This happened out of an abundance of caution -- they were hedging their bets against Gaspra being in a slightly different location than they predicted, so they imaged the spot where they predicted Gaspra to be as well as areas immediately adjacent to that spot. The result was that there was only one observation in which Gaspra loomed large enough to fill the camera's field of view, the canonical view of Gaspra; the rest of the images shot near Galileo's closest approach don't contain Gaspra at all.
So here's the complete catalog:

After finding so many cool pictures of Ida that I hadn't seen before, Gaspra was a bit disappointing, because there wasn't much here that was new to me. I had the most fun animating the approach images:

And here's a couple of takes on color combinations, one of which I've posted before.


So there you have it. Gaspra!
Take a Stand for Our Future in Space
Take action for space exploration! Give today to have your gift matched up to $75,000.
Donate