Monday, July 18, 2011

astro picture for the day

The planets and stars have mystified Humanity since Humanity maybe first noticing and asking questions.  Galileo found a remarkable fact that started physics - different masses fall at the same rate  . . . in a vacuum.  He also invented(transfered the optics findings of others actually) the refractor telescope; he was the first to see the Moon enough to realize it's a planet just like ours(Kepler actually managed to point a telescope late in his life after some communications between them).  Galileo say the phases of Venus, the 'Galilean' moons of Jupiter, the 'horns' of Saturn(he couldn't see them all that well) and much else.  Point is that the heavens have opened up to Humanity only recently.  With the dawn of the space age, we sent probes to the planets(the stars are still well beyond our technological ability).  Those images in some ways defined the twentieth century.  Still, the images of the asteroids are farelly new; and, I think farely exciting.

I remember the Galileo spacecraft took the first asteroid picture in the Nineties I do believe.  That would be Gaspra.  The photo is exciting.  We were to soon get photos of more asteroids in the years since.  Some had remarkable surprises like some asteroids had asteroid moons(never heard any sci-fi think of that one!)

I'm not sure if Gauss discovered Ceres and/or Vesta; but, i know that he did some astronomy on of them; in his time, the asteroids were a bit of a mystery.  Were they elaborate worlds like the Earth, Mars, and Jupiter(and the others)?  Eventually, it was noted that most of the asteroids seemed to reside in orbits between Jupiter and Mars; that certainly seemed peculiar!  That's probably as fascinating as the Asteroid were for awhile.  Today, we've found 'apollo' asteroids; asteroids that come from the asteroid belt and cross the orbit of the Earth.  Astronomers today believe that most meteorites found on earth actually come from Vesta!

Vesta is the second largest Asteroid in the same Asteroid belt as Ceres.  The spaceprobe that is going to study Vesta for a year, will rocket out of orbit of  Vesta and go into orbit around Ceres which is even larger! 

considering Vesta's remarkable round shape, I'd say that Vesta is at the limit of being called an asteroid versus a planet(something with enough gravitation to make a round shape).  In looking at the first photos of Vesta(after hundreds of years of seeing images of the planets, and many decades after sending proves to all the major planets of the solar system), I can't help noticing the swirly patterns.  This reminds me of some such patterns on a moon of like Satern, or Uranus, or Neptune.  I should look it up; but, there's a moon of one of those planets that has this same pattern!  This must mean something geologically speaking!

Just like going to Saturn for its rings could give a laboratory of the solar nebular that coalesed into the planets of our solar system, going to Vesta is like looking at any of the rocky planets at that growth size.  It's a snapshot of the formation of a planet - frozen in the vacuum of space.  I find it rather exciting!  What's equally exciting is we're going to go to Ceres next, and Pluto even before then will get a new photo giving us our first look at that world as well!  Pluto has one large moon and two others; it' s a four larger than Ceres like system!  Pluto will be more exciting that Ceres!  And then, the probe will go to taking the photo of a Sedna which is a bigger world than Pluto found recently by the Mount Palomar telescope in like the 1990!  Just the astronomy of these smaller worlds is exciting over the next decade or two!

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