CE-2 flyby of Toutatis |
CE-2 flyby of Toutatis |
Aug 25 2012, 04:27 PM
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#1
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1729 Joined: 3-August 06 From: 43° 35' 53" N 1° 26' 35" E Member No.: 1004 |
I thought it was time to split the subject from the Moon forum.
Admins, can you move the relevant messages here? anyway, just out: an interesting blog article by Bill Gray explaining how he recovered the probe and how he computed the orbit yielding the 13 December flyby date Chang'e 2: The Full Story |
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Dec 15 2012, 12:38 AM
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#2
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Administrator Group: Admin Posts: 5172 Joined: 4-August 05 From: Pasadena, CA, USA, Earth Member No.: 454 |
I'm trying to figure out what the scale of the image is, with the endgame, of course, being the addition of this body to my asteroids-visited-by-spacecraft montage. A major question for an elongated body is: are we seeing its maximum dimension, or is it foreshortened?
From this JPL page, the radar-derived dimensions of Toutatis: "The asteroid's maximum extents along the principal axes are (1.92, 2.29, 4.60) +/- 0.10 km. " Measuring on the photo, I get that the long axis here (which may not be the full length, if it's not broadside-on) is 792 pix The short axis here should be somewhere in between the 1.92 and 2.29 axes, and it's 312 pix That ratio is about 0.4, which is almost identical to 1.92/4.60 Which would mean that (assuming the JPL numbers are correct) we really are looking at it pretty close to broadside-on, with the plane of the sky being close to the plane of the minimum and maximum principal axes. Somebody please check my work!! -------------------- My website - My Patreon - @elakdawalla on Twitter - Please support unmannedspaceflight.com by donating here.
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