Rosetta flyby of Asteroid Steins, 5th September 2008 |
Rosetta flyby of Asteroid Steins, 5th September 2008 |
Jun 19 2008, 06:53 AM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 568 Joined: 20-April 05 From: Silesia Member No.: 299 |
Only 78 days to Stein encounter ! I can't believe I forgot about this event.
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Jul 4 2008, 02:35 PM
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#2
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1075 Joined: 21-September 07 From: Québec, Canada Member No.: 3908 |
I've been doing some calculations. Rosetta's narrow angle camera has a field of view of 2,35 x 2,35 degrees. The image size is 2048 x 2048 pixels. At a distance of 800 km, if Steins is about 5 km wide, it will subtend an angle of about 20 arc minutes. At closest approach, Steins' image should then be about 300 pixels wide. That's not much, is it?
For comparison, here's an image of the asteroid Gaspra scaled to 300 pixels wide. That's about what we should expect from the Steins flyby. I didn't take motion blur into account. I don't know if it will be an issue. If I made some errors, thanks for correcting me. |
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Jul 4 2008, 07:16 PM
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#3
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Interplanetary Dumpster Diver Group: Admin Posts: 4404 Joined: 17-February 04 From: Powell, TN Member No.: 33 |
To be fair, Gaspra is a much bigger asteroid - 18.2×10.5×8.9 km - and these are the best Galileo images at their original size. The larger image is a mosaic of two frames, but it just happened that the asteroid was imaged on the edge of the CCD - it could have easily fit in one frame. The smaller image is the next best shot at its original size (it is part of a color sequence). We often see the larger image in greatly enlarged forms and with a false color overlay from infrared data.
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