Friday 13 December 2013
Sometimes there are new images from space that inspire the scientists. Or how about watching old pictures just once more closely. The do planetary scientists and discover the asteroid Vesta quasi again.
The inconspicuous side of Vesta. (Photo: AP) scientists is a look at previously hidden beauties of the asteroid Vesta succeeded. New evaluated data of the U.S. space probe “Dawn” show varied geological formations and unique landscapes, such as the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Katlenburg-Lindau announced. The pictures are evidence therefore the geological diversity of the protoplanets, which is stuck in an early stage of development and planets in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter orbits the sun.
The NASA probe “Dawn” had reached Vesta in July 2011 and orbits until August 2012. The camera system on board of “Dawn” was led by the MPS in cooperation with the Institute for Planetary Research of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin and the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering in Braunschweig and built.
MPS scientists have now succeeded in imaging errors to suppress as far as possible in the reevaluation of the camera data. In addition, the calibration of the camera was so refined that even the finest brightness changes are displayed. This has been made among others by quake buried craters on Vesta surface visible also from other asteroids registered foreign materials.
nature better than any artist
Impressed showed the MPS researchers mainly from the aesthetics of the color-coded images, in which are the different colors for different materials on the surface of the protoplanet. “No artist could paint such a thing,” said Martin Hoffmann, a scientific member of the camera team. “This creates just nature.”
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viewed with the human eye sees color Vesta, however unspectacular: The asteroid presents itself as a grayish, irregularly shaped body with a diameter of about 530 kilometers, covered with a variety of large and small craters
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Launched five years ago, research probe “Dawn” is currently for dwarf planet Ceres go. 2015, the probe reach the heavenly bodies, which also draws its orbit around the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The “Dawn” mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the U.S. space agency NASA.
Source: n-tv.de
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