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ESA Portal - Asteroids: treasures of the past and a threat to the future

 

 

 

"Desert sands, wind, and ancient rivers have eroded the dark, 100-million-year-old sandstone, but the crater's rings and central uplift still stand out," says Reddy. "El-Baz thinks this is the source of a yellow-green desert glass found throughout the region..

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SpaceWeather.com -- News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth

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For Release Upon Receipt - March 3, 2006
Contact: Kira Edler, 617-358-1240, kedler@bu.edu

LARGEST CRATER IN THE GREAT SAHARA DISCOVERED BY BOSTON UNIVERSITY SCIENTISTS

Researchers from BU’s Center for Remote Sensing locate crater using detailed satellite data

(Boston) – Researchers from Boston University have discovered the remnants of the largest crater of the Great Sahara of North Africa, which may have been formed by a meteorite impact tens of millions of years ago. Dr. Farouk El-Baz made the discovery while studying satellite images of the Western Desert of Egypt with his colleague, Dr. Eman Ghoneim, at BU's Center for Remote Sensing.

The double-ringed crater – which has an outer rim surrounding an inner ring – is approximately 31 kilometers in diameter. Prior to the latest finding, the Sahara's biggest known crater, in Chad, measured just over 12 kilometers. According to El-Baz, the Center's director, the crater’s vast area suggests the location may have been hit by a meteorite the entire size of the famous Meteor (Barringer) Crater in Arizona which is 1.2 kilometers wide.

El-Baz named his find “Kebira,” which means “large” in Arabic and also relates to the crater’s physical location on the northern tip of the Gilf Kebir region in southwestern Egypt. The reason why a crater this big had never been found before is something the scientists are speculating.

“Kebira may have escaped recognition because it is so large – equivalent to the total expanse of the Cairo urban region from its airport in the northeast to the Pyramids of Giza in the southwest,” said Dr. El-Baz. “Also, the search for craters typically concentrates on small features, especially those that can be identified on the ground. The advantage of a view from space is that it allows us to see regional patterns and the big picture.”

The researchers also found evidence that Kebira suffered significant water and wind erosion which may have helped keep its features unrecognizable to others. “The courses of two ancient rivers run through it from the east and west,” added Ghoneim.

The terrain in which the crater resides is composed of 100 million year-old sandstone – the same material that lies under much of the eastern Sahara. The researchers hope that field investigations and samples of the host rock will help in determining the exact age of the crater and its surroundings.

Kebira's shape is reminiscent of the many double-ringed craters on the Moon, which Dr. El-Baz remembers from his years of work with the Apollo program. Because of this, he believes the crater will figure prominently in future research in comparative planetology. And, since its shape points to an origin of extraterrestrial impact, it will likely prove to be the event responsible for the extensive field of “Desert Glass” – yellow-green silica glass fragments found on the desert surface between the giant dunes of the Great Sand Sea in southwestern Egypt.

Dr. El-Baz is research professor and Director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University. He is a renowned geologist who over the past 30 years has conducted studies in all the major deserts of the world. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and the Geological Society of America. The latter established the “Farouk El-Baz Award for Desert Research” to reward excellence in arid land studies.

Dr. Eman Ghoneim is a research associate at the Center for Remote Sensing. She is an expert in hydrological modeling and now conducts research on arid land geomorphology with emphasis on groundwater concentration under the direction of Dr. El-Baz.

The Boston University Center for Remote Sensing is a research facility that was established in 1986. Researchers at the Center apply techniques of remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) to research in the fields of archaeology, geography and geology. In 1997, the Center was recognized by NASA as a “Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing.”

Founded in 1839, Boston University is an internationally recognized institution of higher education and research. With more than 30,000 students, it is the fourth largest independent university in the United States. BU contains 17 colleges and schools along with a number of multi-disciplinary centers and institutes, which are central to the school’s research and teaching mission.

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Note to editors: Images available online at http://www.bu.edu/remotesensing/News/kebira/index.html

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News & Events - News Releases 

Asteroid 2004 VD17 classed as Torino Scale 2

Article Posted: March 01, 2006

By: David Morrison

A new 500-m asteroid has appeared with a possible impact in 2102, yielding a value of 2 on the Torino impact risk scale.

Note...

Level 2: Meriting Attention by Astronomers [Color = yellow]

A discovery, which may become routine with expanded searches, of an object making a somewhat close but not highly unusual pass near the Earth. While meriting attention by astronomers, there is no cause for public attention or public concern as an actual collision is very unlikely.  New telescopic observationsvery likely will lead to re-assignment to Level 0 {No Hazard}.  Source - Text version of the Torino Scale (revision 2004). 

At the end of February, orbital calculations for near-Earth-asteroid (NEA) 2004 VD17 indicated that the risk of an impact within the next century (specifically on May 4, 2102) was higher than that of any other known asteroid. The probability, based on 687 telescopic observations spanning 475 days, is listed on the JPL NEO Program webpage as a bit less than 1 in 1000. This probability, while small, raises the possible 2102 impact to a Torino scale value of 2 (meriting attention from astronomers), which is higher than any other asteroid. (Note: the impact probability for 1950 DA is larger, but since this hazard is not realized until 2880, it falls outside the one-century range of the Torino scale). For more on the Torino scale see http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/torino.cfm.

Judging from its brightness, NEA 2004 VD17 has a nominal diameter near 500 m and a mass of nearly a billion tons. While below the threshold for a global catastrophe, the nominal impact energy of more than 10,000 megatons is comparable to all the world's nuclear arsenals. There are no radar observations available, and the asteroid has not been characterized in any detail, so all these numbers should be taken as approximate.

For comparison, NEA Apophis (formerly 2004 MN4) is currently listed on the JPL webpage as Torino scale 1, with an impact probability on April 13, 2036, of about 1 part in 5000. Apophis is also smaller, with a nominal diameter of 300 m and mass of less than 100 million tons. The orbits of teh two asteroids are also different. Apophis will be a hazard only if it passes through a small orbital "keyhole" in 2029. There is no similar keyhole in the case of VD17, although it does make relatively close passes by Earth in 2032, 2041 and 2067.

Fortunately, it is nearly a century before the 2102 possible hazard from NEA 2004 VD17. This should provide ample time to refine the orbit and, most probably, determine that the asteroid will miss the Earth. On the other hand, there are no near-term opportunities for additional observations, so VD17 will probably remain at Torino scale 2 for quite some time.

The above information is taken from the NASA/JPL NEO Program Office webpage at http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov, and from a personal communication from Steve Chesley at JPL.

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News Article: Asteroid 2004 VD17 classed as Torino Scale 2

 

UH Hilo scientists who will be participating in the Pan-STARRS project. Front row:  Dr. Richard Crowe, Dr. Lawrence Armendarez, Eric Small (Pan-STARRS intern) Back row: Justin Stevick (Pan-STARRS intern), John Hamilton, Norman Purves, Dr. Robert Fox, Isaac Crosson (intern), Heather Kaluna (intern)

Astrophysicists at the University of Hawaii at Hilo have become partners in the Pan-STARRS project, an observatory to search the sky for dangerous asteroids and other unexpected celestial events. 

The prototype telescope, with a single 70-inch-diameter mirror, is currently under construction on Haleakala and will shortly be outfitted with the world's largest digital camera, a device with 1.4 billion pixels. The full Pan-STARRS observatory, which is expected to be completed in 2009, will have four such mirrors and will survey the whole sky several times each month.

Scientists on the Hilo campus will contribute both to the development of the system and to reaping the scientific rewards that will follow once the observatory becomes operational. Students and faculty at UH Hilo will also be active in spreading the word of the educational opportunities arising from the project in the local community and will develop material that can be used in high schools to promote the project.  

The project capitalizes on expertise in developing astronomical detectors at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy in Manoa, where experts are working with MIT's Lincoln Laboratory to develop the new detectors. The data will be processed with the help of the Maui High Performance Computer Center (MHPCC) on Maui, and data will be made available to the community via a database being developed by partner Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). The final system is planned to replace the University's 36-year-old 2.2-meter (88-inch) telescope on Mauna Kea. Institute for Astronomy Director Dr. Rolf Kudritzki said, "Pan-STARRS is the first major telescope facility to be developed by the IfA in several decades. It leverages the unique features of Hawaiian observing sites which deliver the sharpest images on the planet, as well as the enormous strengths in both technological and scientific skills that have been built up at the University. Larger telescopes on Mauna Kea will be used to follow up the discoveries of Pan-STARRS."  

A major goal of Pan-STARRS is to discover and characterize Earth-approaching objects, both asteroids and comets, that might pose a danger to our planet. However, the huge volume of images produced by this system will provide valuable data for many other kinds of scientific programs. The system will generate up to 10 terabytes (10 million megabytes) of data per night, and these data will be used to generate a multicolor digital atlas of the entire sky as seen from Hawaii. Dr. Nick Kaiser, leader of the project says, "By being able to scan the sky so rapidly and repeatedly, this observatory will open up a whole range of new possibilities in 'time-domain astronomy.' It will make enormous numbers of discoveries of moving objects like asteroids, variable stars and transients like supernovae and hypernovae. The data will be used to map the dark matter in the Universe, and also to characterize the mysterious 'dark energy' that is driving the universal expansion."  

"We welcome the participation of our colleagues and students from UH Hilo," said Dr. Kaiser, emphasizing the importance the University of Hawaii places on educating Hawaii's students. UH Hilo Physics Department Chair Dr. Robert Fox says, "Our involvement with Pan-STARRS greatly expands UH Hilo's ability to provide a unique astronomy education on the slopes of one of the world’s premier observational sites."

• Pan-STARRS project main page
• UH-HIlo Physics and Astronomy Department
• UH Institute for Astronomy

The Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii conducts research into galaxies, cosmology, stars, planets, and the sun. Its faculty and staff are also involved in astronomy education, deep space missions, and in the development and management of the observatories on Haleakala and Mauna Kea.

Established in 1907 and fully accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the University of Hawaii is the state's sole public system of higher education. The UH System provides an array of undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees and community programs on 10 campuses and through educational, training, and research centers across the state. UH enrolls more than 50,000 students from Hawaii, the U.S. mainland, and around the world.

 

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UH-Hilo joins hunt for killer asteroids

 

 

 

By Bruce Lieberman
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

February 1, 2006

Shortly after sunset Friday, April 13, 2029, if the sky is clear enough, people across Europe and North Africa will see an asteroid appear as a bright point of light flying 19,400 miles overhead before it disappears silently below the western horizon.

Dan Durda illustration Using gravity as a towline, a proposed "tractor" diverts an asteroid from a collision course with Earth.

It all sounds like the premise of “Armageddon,” “Deep Impact” or some other blockbuster Hollywood film. But the asteroid, named 99942 Apophis, is science fact, not science fiction. In December 2004, astronomers caused a brief stir when their calculations estimated that the newly discovered asteroid – named after the ancient Egyptian god, Apep, the Destroyer – might collide with Earth in 2029.

Additional tracking data quickly ruled out the possibility of a 2029 collision. But the potential for a strike in 2036, should the asteroid enter that crucial gravitational space, places it at the top of NASA's list of 3,800 near-Earth asteroids the agency has identified.

Based on the latest information, the asteroid, which is nearly twice the size of Qualcomm Stadium, has a 1-in-6,250 chance of colliding with Earth on April 13, 2036.

“We're very concerned that people put this in perspective,” said Russell Schweickart, a former Apollo astronaut and head of a foundation that focuses public attention on the threat from asteroids and comets.

“This is not something to lose sleep over, (but) it is something the government needs to attend to.”

Right now, NASA is doing little more than looking for asteroids and keeping track of them, Schweickart said. Plans to deflect Apophis, if it becomes necessary, exist only in the pages of a few academic papers.

Last year, Schweickart's group, the B612 Foundation – named for the asteroid in the book, “The Little Prince” – corresponded with NASA officials about the threat of Apophis.

“It would have devastating consequences if it hit,” Schweickart wrote. “There is the serious question of whether, if it is headed toward impact, we will know enough to make a timely decision.”

Schweickart and other scientists urged NASA to place a data-tracking radio transponder on the asteroid's surface by 2014.

A transponder would help nail down orbital alterations caused by a phenomenon called the Yarkovsky effect. This is produced when an asteroid absorbs energy from the sun and re-radiates it back into space as heat. With one side of the asteroid lit and the other in darkness, the imbalance in thermal radiation produces a tiny acceleration. A transponder would help scientists understand how the Yarkovsky effect is influencing the asteroid's orbit.

NASA responded to the urging with a wait-and-see proposal. “We conclude a space mission based solely on any perceived collision hazard is not warranted at this time,” wrote Mary L. Cleave, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.

The agency believes continued optical and radio telescope observations will rule out Apophis as a threat. If not, NASA would launch a mission to the asteroid by 2018. A radio transponder, placed either in orbit or on its surface, would determine the asteroid's position in 2029 down to a few hundred feet, according to NASA.

If an impact seems probable, a rocket would be launched to deflect the asteroid. The design phase would have to be completed by 2020 in order to launch by 2024, NASA noted.

Schweickart said he doesn't necessarily disagree with NASA's analysis, as long as the agency can design, build, launch and successfully complete such a mission before 2029. “The danger is being overly optimistic about how long it takes to do that.”

If a deflection mission becomes necessary, scientists agree, it will need to be completed before 2029 when Apophis would commit itself to a future collision course. Due to the physics of gravity and orbital mechanics, delaying action would require much, much more energy to move the asteroid.

“That (will be) an impossible task, I'll tell you right now,” Schweickart said.

Cosmic pinball

The threat of an asteroid strike has always been with us. More than four billion years ago, a lot of debris was left over after the ring of gas and dust swirling around a young sun coalesced into planets and moons.

In their lonely roundabouts through the void, these leftovers – asteroids and comets – sometimes pass close to a planet, like two race cars converging as they circle a track.

During a close encounter, the larger object – a planet, for example – can yank the smaller one – an asteroid – out of its orbit. As the two part ways, there is a slight chance that the asteroid will pass through a region of space – astronomers call it a keyhole – where the planet's gravitational pull can alter the asteroid's orbit, setting them on a future collision course.

The physics of this “keyhole” phenomenon are well-understood.

“Based on current knowledge of the orbit of Apophis, we cannot exclude the possibility of it passing through a keyhole and hitting Earth on a subsequent pass,” NASA scientist David Morrison concluded in an article last summer.

Most of the rubble in the solar system is the size of pebbles, even smaller. When these bits collide with Earth, they burn up high in the atmosphere and appear from the ground as streaks of light – shooting stars.

But there are others much, much larger.

Scientists estimate that an asteroid about 7.5 miles in diameter struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago, causing or at least contributing to the extinction of the dinosaurs and reshaping evolution.

The consequences of such a strike today remain staggering. “Material thrown out of the Earth's atmosphere would rain back toward the ground, filling the sky with blazing fireballs and incinerating an area perhaps as large as India or twice the size of Europe,” suggests Mark Chapman, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. Dust from such a blast would block sunlight for many months, killing plant and animal life.

In 1998, Congress directed NASA to find and track, by 2008, 90 percent of inner solar system asteroids more than two-thirds of a mile in diameter. Of 3,800 or so asteroids now tracked by NASA, 824 are in this category, but none appears to pose a threat to Earth for at least another 100 years.

Astronomers estimate there may be hundreds of thousands of asteroids in the inner solar system that are much smaller. Of the 3,800, 748 are designated “potentially hazardous” because they come within 4.6 million miles of Earth's orbital path and are larger than 500 feet in diameter. Apophis, at 1,050 feet, is one of these.

Chapman has estimated the chances of a strike by an asteroid more than two-thirds of a mile in diameter during this century at 0.02 percent, and a smaller one like Apophis at 0.2 to 1.0 percent.

If Apophis assumes a collision course, it would crash into Earth's atmosphere at about 28,000 miles per hour and explode with a force of an 870-megaton blast – an explosion 58,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Apophis would likely hit along a narrow corridor in the Pacific Ocean, sending monstrous tsunami waves toward the West Coast, the B612 Foundation has estimated. Immediate damage in the U.S. – independent of deaths and subsequent economic fallout – could top $400 billion.

Gravity tow

Two astronomers have proposed an alternative to such a catastrophe.

Edward T. Lu and Stanley G. Love of NASA's Johnson Space Center suggest parking an unmanned spacecraft beside a threatening asteroid – in essence flying in formation with the rock.

Any object with mass exerts gravity, so the spacecraft – without touching the asteroid – could over time drag the asteroid slightly off its orbital path.

“The spacecraft will simply hover above the surface,” Lu and Love wrote in Nature in November. “The spacecraft will tow the asteroid with no physical attachment, using gravity as a towline.”

A one-ton gravitational tractor could sufficiently divert Apophis outside the keyhole by hovering next to it for about a month, Lu and Love said.

A gravity tow approach would avoid the risks associated with pushing or crashing into the asteroid, which might destabilize it and break it apart.

“It's a completely controlled deflection method,” Schweickart said.

As scientists ponder that proposal, time marches on toward 2029 and 2036. Beginning this year, astronomers will lose visual and radar contact with Apophis, and the asteroid will not become visible again until 2013.

“We'll go many years with basically no additional information on where it's headed,” Schweickart said.

Schweickart, Chapman and others have noted that for the first time in history humans have the ability to do something about this impending threat now 40 million miles from Earth.

“An impact can be predicted in advance in ways that are imperfect,” Chapman wrote. “(But) in contrast with the dinosaurs, human beings have the insight and capability to avoid extinction.”

Whether they will do that is not yet clear, Schweickart said. This month he plans to speak about the issue at a United Nations meeting in Vienna and is continuing discussions with NASA. Even if Apophis eludes Earth, he emphasizes, it won't be the last dangerous asteroid headed for Earth.

“We need to know about them, and at the same time we need to be developing the technology (to divert one), and somebody needs to be in charge,” he said.

“I can say that till I'm blue in the face, but it doesn't make any difference if there isn't anybody with the responsibility to do it.”

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http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/20060201-9999-lz1c01nasa.html

 

 

 

Image credit: Lynette Cook and W. M. Keck Observatory

Artist's representation of binary asteroid (617) Patroclus, a trojan asteroid gravitationally locked 60-degrees behind the orbit of Jupiter in its path around the Sun.

Scientists at UC Berkeley think this system may have formed from an ancient comet several billion years in the past. The gravitational pull of Jupiter may have split the object in half, resulting in two, almost equal pieces.

Trojan asteroid Patroclus: A comet in disguise?

MAUNA KEA, Hawaii (February 1, 2006) Like the hollow wooden horse hiding Greek warriors in the Trojan War, could an entire population of asteroids be masquerading as comets? Observations of the binary Trojan asteroid (617) Patroclus taken at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea have astronomers wondering if asteroids caught in the gravitationally neutral zone of the Sun-Jupiter system might actually be ancient comets and space dust.

Dr. Franck Marchis of the University of California at Berkeley is leading an international team of astronomers that has discovered that the composition and density of the Patroclus system is remarkably similar to that of comets. The components are less dense than water, probably porous and probably, like snow, made out of water ice. The results, published in the February 2nd issue of Nature, are raising important questions about how this Trojan asteroid migrated to its current location in the solar system and it how it acquired its binary nature.

Trojan asteroids are those that lie 60 degrees in front or 60 degrees behind the planet Jupiter in its orbit around the Sun. They are relatively small and quite faint, making them difficult to study even with the world’s largest ground-based telescopes. A new technique using sodium lasers with ground-based image-correcting technology called “Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics” (LGS-AO) is helping scientists study asteroids with more detail than ever before.

The LGS-AO system installed on the Keck II 10-meter telescope at Mauna Kea removes the blurring effects caused by Earth’s atmosphere from astronomical images and produces the finest infrared images in the world.

“Space telescopes are tremendous tools for observing remote solar system targets, but large ground-based telescopes equipped with Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics systems provide both the power to collect more light and the ability to study objects with even more detail,” said Dr. David Le Mignant, adaptive optics scientist and lead team member for the LGS-AO science operations at the W. M. Keck Observatory. “With LGS-AO, we observe a different population of solar system targets: fainter and smaller objects like Patroclus and more distant ones like the object beyond Pluto. This should lead us to many new discoveries,” added Dr. Le Mignant.

Modern theories suggest that Trojan asteroids may have formed in the Solar Nebula at the same time as the rest of the solid bodies in the Solar System. To date, more than one thousand such asteroids have been discovered.

Asteroid Patroclus was previously believed to be a single object about 150 kilometers (90 miles) in diameter, but recent observations from the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii found that Patroclus is actually comprised of two objects, making it the first binary Trojan asteroid to be discovered. The discovery of a binary asteroid was not as surprising as the fact that the two objects are nearly identical in size. Dr. Marchis’ team found the larger piece is 122 kilometer (76 miles) wide at its largest point, and the similar-sized partner is 112 kilometers (70 miles). The two pieces orbit their center of mass every four days, separated by a distance of about 680 kilometers (423 miles). The names of these objects are associated with the heroes of Homer’s Iliad. The asteroid Patroclus was named after the best friend and companion to Achilles, the main character of the story and Greek hero of the Trojan War.

Scientists believe there may be as many Trojan asteroids as there are main-belt asteroids, but they are difficult to study with high spatial resolution because they are too faint for most adaptive optics systems.

“The Laser Guide Star system is a remarkable breakthrough in ground-based observations,” said Dr. Franck Marchis of the University of California at Berkeley. “With such a capability we are able to regularly study small bodies in the solar system in ways that were not possible before. We want to thank the Keck Observatory Adaptive Optics team for their involvement in our observing program which helped make these results possible.”

Since collisions of small bodies in the solar system typically happen at relatively high speeds and leave behind lots of small debris, it is unlikely that Patroclus was formed this way, or that an asteroid the size of Patroclus would have experienced a collision in the last billion years. How then, could the Patroclus binary system have formed?

New results have some scientists theorizing that Patroclus originated from a very early time in the solar system’s history, about four and a half billion years ago. Patroclus may have formed during the accretion phase of solar system formation, similar to thousands of other objects in the Kuiper Belt, an outer region of the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. Recent simulations suggest that the giant gas planets migrated outward and gravitationally removed neighboring planetesimals. Some of these objects were then subsequently caught into the gravitationally-stable Lagrangian points of the Jupiter-Sun system.

The story of Patroclus may be even more complex: As Patroclus encountered the planet Jupiter several billion years ago, it may have gotten a little too close to the mighty planet. The tremendous gravitational forces of Jupiter, which are three times stronger than that of Earth, may have split the small and porous body in half through an effect known as “tidal splitting.”

"The Patroclus system displays similar characteristics to binary Near-Earth asteroids,” said Dr. Marchis. “Near-Earth binary asteroids are believed to be formed during an encounter with a planet, which results in tidal splitting. Recent published work from our collaborators leads us to suggest that a Trojan asteroid may be formed in a similar way -- through an encounter with Jupiter. This scenario is different than what is believed to cause binary asteroid systems in the main asteroid belt, which typically feature two or more bodies of unequal size.”

The team responsible for finding the mass and size of the Trojan binary asteroid Patroclus are Franck Marchis, Imke de Pater and Michael H. Wong of the University of California at Berkeley; Daniel Hestroffer, Pascal Descamps, Jérôme Berthier and Frédéric Vachier of the Institut de Mécanique Céléste et de Calcul des Ephémérides (IMCCE); and Antonin Bouchez, Randall Campbell, Jason Chin, Marcos van Dam, Scott Hartman, Erik Johansson, Robert Lafon, David Le Mignant, Paul Stomski, Doug Summers and Peter Wizinowich of the W. M. Keck Observatory.

Funding for the project was provided by the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Adaptive Optics and by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through the Science Mission Directorate Research and Analysis Programs.

Data was obtained between November 2004 and May 2005 with the second generation Near Infrared Camera (NIRC2) on the Keck II 10-meter telescope at the W. M. Keck Observatory, managed by the California Association for Research in Astronomy, a non-profit 501 (c) (3) corporation. The first Keck telescope began observations in May, 1993. Its twin joined in 1996. Together, the telescopes are the world’s most powerful eyes looking into the optical and infrared universe.

Media Contact:
Laura K. Kraft
W.M. Keck Observatory
65-1120 Mamalahoa Hwy.
Kamuela, HI 96743
(808) 885-7887

To receive e-mail updates on Keck Observatory News:
contact: newsletter@keck.hawaii.edu

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Patroclus: Comet in Disguise?

Image credit: NASA/JPL

+ High resolution

Image above: A particle impact on the aluminum frame that holds the aerogel tiles. The debris from the impact shot into the adjacent aerogel tile producing the explosion pattern of ejecta framents captured in the material. Photo Credit: NASA/JPL

Since the Sample Canister has been delivered to the Stardust cleanroom at Johson Space Center on January 17th, the Preliminary Examination Team along with JSC Curatorial staff have been making good progress toward processing the returned samples. The processing has made very good progress and is ahead of planned schedule on several fronts.

"This exceeded all of our grandest expectations," said Dr. Donald Brownlee, Stardust principal investigator, during a press conference following the sample cannister's arrival in Houston.

+ Jan. 25 Status Report
+ Watch capsule reentry movie
+ View Stardust Cleanroom Webcam
 

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NASA - Stardust