7 November 2010: Dawn is now just 15 million km away from 4 Vesta
Sunday, November 07, 2010
This is an update to this and many other previous posts tracking the position of the Dawn spacecraft in relation to its first destination 4 Vesta, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt. As always the comparison used is the asteroid 21 Lutetia taken at a distance of 900,000 km by the spacecraft Rosetta during a recent flyby:
whereas Vesta is still much farther away (15 million km) but has a diameter of 540 km in comparison with Lutetia's 100 km. This gives Vesta a surface area some 30 times larger than that of 21 Lutetia, roughly equivalent to Macedonia vs. Turkey both in terms of real surface area and comparative size:
And now the image showing the distance from Dawn to Vesta:
The grey circle at the bottom is Vesta during the last update, about a month ago when it was 18 million km away.
15 million km, by the way, is just 0.1 AU.
In the meantime as we wait we now have a quick video showing the images of the comet Hartley 2 during the flyby a few days ago:
but just as interesting is this video showing the team as they waited for the first closeup images from the probe, and their elation as soon as it came in.
The grey circle at the bottom is Vesta during the last update, about a month ago when it was 18 million km away.
15 million km, by the way, is just 0.1 AU.
In the meantime as we wait we now have a quick video showing the images of the comet Hartley 2 during the flyby a few days ago:
but just as interesting is this video showing the team as they waited for the first closeup images from the probe, and their elation as soon as it came in.
