Rosetta flyby of Asteroid Steins, 5th September 2008 Options

[peter59]

Only 78 days to Stein encounter ! I can't believe I forgot about this event.

[elakdawalla]

New montage is up.

OK, now I'm really going to try to get some sleep.

--Emily

[climber]

New montage is up.
OK, now I'm really going to try to get some sleep.
--Emily

Nice idea to put Steins close to Anne Frank, there are quite alike.
Trouble will come with Lutecia's fly by! You'll have to change your scale... or do the same we can see on a representation of the Solar System : the Sun is shown only partialy.
Thanks a lot anyway, this is an important piece of work

[JRehling]

Trouble will come with Lutecia's fly by! You'll have to change your scale...

I think one of the central truths, one of the first we learn, in the study of outer space is that spatial scales differ from our everyday world by running across many more orders of magnitude than we can visualize. A tabletop model of the solar system would make the planets so small that virtually no one would even consider building such a thing without using different scales for the distances and the diameters of objects. Consider that if the Sun and Alpha Centauri were the sizes of basketballs, a scale model would have to place one in New York and the other in Beijing.

When I made a screensaver of many solar system worlds for my son, I used the fourth power of diameter to convey the idea that some are bigger than others, but keep the smaller ones from being invisibly small.

Whenever I hear a simple count of how many satellites one of the giants planet has, I tune out, it seems so irrelevant to count some of them equal to Ganymede.

The fascinating thing with this comparative asteroidology is how they appear at different scales. Itokawa obviously has a texture we'll never see on something the size of Eros, much less Ceres.