Close Up Photo of Asteroid

i-09a100def2db7188b76474e253b76793-dawn20110811-640-thumb-500x273-68334.jpg

3D Image of Vesta's Equatorial Region

This anaglyph image of Vesta's equator was put together from two clear filter images, taken on July 24, 2011 by the framing camera instrument aboard NASA's Dawn spacecraft. The anaglyph image shows hills, troughs, ridges and steep craters. The framing camera has a resolution of about 524 yards (480 meters) per pixel. Use red-green (or red-blue) glasses to view in 3-D (left eye: red; right eye: green [or blue]).

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. It is a project of the Discovery Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.

The framing cameras were developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by NASA, the Max Planck Society and DLR. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena.

All the details are here

Tags

More like this

NASA's Dawn space ship is getting closer to the asteroid Vesta, and has produced a very short movie. The movie is a compilation of 20 frames, shown here repeating several times: This movie shows surface details beginning to resolve as NASA's Dawn spacecraft closes in on the giant asteroid Vesta.…
NASA's Dawn spacecraft shut down its ion propulsion system today as scheduled. The spacecraft is now gliding toward a Mars flyby in February of next year. "Dawn has completed the thrusting it needs to use Mars for a gravity assist to help get us to Vesta," said Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer,…
HT to :: the Core 4 :: for the link to the newest href="http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA08362">picture of Saturn.  The complete image file is over 35MB.  You would need a  4088x2908 monitor to see the whole thing at full resolution. This is one where you have to use your…
The Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has been all snapped together and stuff and is ready to be launched into outer space from Vandenberg in November. This will be a major eye in the sky for cosmology, since it will be able to see things that heretofore only space insects could see....…