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Space Science

Color Images of Eros 7

sbuckhopper writes, "CNN.com has an article about how NASA was able to get the first ever color picture of an asteroid. These photos were taken with NASA's Near Earth Rendezvous spacecraft, and allow more of the asteroid landscape to be viewed than ever before. "
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Color Images of Eros

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  • So is Surfwatch so clumsy as to block a site simply because it contains the word "Eros"? That blows goats. I mean how many p*rn sites contain the word "Eros" anyway? It would be better to block the string "Natalie Portman's pink taco" - oh wait, then this page would be blocked. Peacefire is a website that can show you how to disable blocking software.
  • Two quotes from the article:
    Collected by the Near Earth Rendezvous spacecraft, some of the images show signs of geological layering, which suggests that Eros was once part of a much larger celestial body, said Andrew Cheng, a NEAR project scientist.

    The density of Eros is about the same as the Earth's crust.

    I wonder if this asteriod could have potentially even been a fragment from a large planetoid collsion with Earth, which some scientists speculate created our moon.

  • The project homepage is here. [jhuapl.edu] Mirrored here. [swri.edu]
  • From the caption to this image [jhuapl.edu].

    Inside the gouge, however, only smaller craters are present, indicating that the area within the gouge is younger than the surface along the terminator.


    I know that the general rule is that the more densly cratered a surface, the older it is. This tells us that the surface of Europa is very young while the surface of nearby Callista is older. But might it not be strictly true in this case?

    It seems to me that the gouge is somewhat sheltered so that the proability of it being hit is something less that proportional to the surface area exposed. Consider the extereme case of an object shaped like a bowl. The inside and outside surfaces of a bowl are of roughly equal areas, but it seems to me that the probability of a strike on the outside of a bowl is higher than the probability of a strike on the inside of a bowl because the outside obscures the inside more often than vice versa.

    Anomalous: inconsistent with or deviating from what is usual, normal, or expected
  • I'll have to go home before I can see the picture.

    Don't you love surfwatch?

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