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A repurposed NASA spacecraft swung past Comet Hartley 2 on November 4, snapping detailed photographs such as the one above from just hundreds of kilometers away. The flyby provided a detailed look at the comet and the shape of its nucleus, which a mission manager had earlier called "a cross between a bowling pin and a pickle" based on ground-based radar readings.
The EPOXI mission spacecraft and the comet were about 23 million kilometers from Earth at the time of the encounter. EPOXI is a repurposing of NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft, which in 2005 visited another icy, dusty body known as Comet Tempel 1. In that rendezvous Deep Impact not only got a good look at the comet but also released an impactor that slammed into the nucleus to probe its composition.
Initial analyses of the EPOXI flyby indicate that the actual distance between spacecraft and comet was close to the planned separation of about 700 kilometers, according to a NASA press release.
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24 Comments
Add CommentFantastic photo. Any theories to explain that peculiarly smooth band around the middle? It looks like it was shaped on a lathe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula K LeGuin)!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm just happy it isn't "potato-shaped" like nearly every non-spherical thing!
why dont they put a rover dowm. With a parachute amd release some chaffe to deflect any missiles and a beacon
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisand a solar powered cd player plying tunes
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI mean - it must be lovely up there at a billion dollars an hour. That spacecraft must be enjoying itself at our expense. Sunning it up. Why not put a deck chair up there. And cocktails. At that price - service should be pretty good.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWould it last forever? Those tunes would be belting out well after earth has gone.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(..MINED?) ..i didn't say that, ( i only thunk it.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy not put a solar sail on it and try to change its tractory. Or a solar parachute - or some small engines and bring that sucker home.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat does comet taste like?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI understand that the moon tastes like a gun that's been fired. Could it rather be that this smell is due to contamination by the rockets of the landers. Noting that moondust on earth does not smell.
However it would be interesting to taste moondust on earth as one might get some interaction with saliva from sub surface elements. Could it be that the chemistry is different on the moon given the propensity of sharp catalytic edges on dust, bathed in ultraviolet. Add in perhaps some accompanying electrostatic charge at specific nanoscale features and would we even recognize the resulting chemistry?
And moreover would we recognize the evolution of any life form resultant from this chemisty. Could a type of electrostatically based life form live within what is reported as inert 'moondust'.i.e. delocalised within the substance of the moon. Couls we identity components of such a life form in moondust on earth if we placed it within a similar environment to its home planet. eg try and observe the behavior of electrostatic charge or the dynamic behaviour od the dust at the atomic level using AFM etc.
WE do not know where our own consciousness derives from - so how could we know the consciousness of another life form?
Reflectogenesis@hotmail.co.uk
Peter Reynolds
Drawing a tiny amount of background in this area, I would suggest that this comet started out as a molten or semi-molten blob, developed a pockmarked surface, and then was spun fast enough (by the gravitational pull of a passing object, perhaps?) to be stretched apart by its rotation into two sections, leaving the younger and smoother interior portion holding the two sections together. This would also explain the narrowing of the link toward the center, like a kind of cosmic taffy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNone of you really looked at the picture, did you? That peanut-shaped thingie is artificially lit and ATTACHED TO A SPHERE much larger and nearly unreflective.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.freecommonlaw.us/images/plans/AsHartley2.png
www.freecommonlaw.us/images/plans/AsHart2B.png
This looks a little like a bar magnet with a dusting of iron filings. Maybe this asteroid exhibits magnetism or perhaps this is an electric field?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNone of you really looked at the picture, did you? That peanut-shaped thingie is artificially lit and ATTACHED TO A much larger and nearly unreflective SPHERE shown below.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.freecommonlaw.us/images/plans/AsHartley2.png
www.freecommonlaw.us/images/plans/AsHart2B.png
www.freecommonlaw.us/images/plans/AsHart2D.png
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAstronomers might as well claim Gibraltar is an asteroid, as this monolith, which is a statue of FACES. I believe this is the MASTHEAD and civic center of Nibiru, the sometimes-present planet.
When are you guys going to start opening your eyes to see?
EEWC, BS, MA, webmaster and author
www.abidemiracles.com/images/science/ASHart2D.png
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoesn't come up even though the file name is correct.
Try again
By posting the same spam ad over and over, you not only quell conversation on this topic, you dump contempt on this whole place. Why is it allowed?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe same spam has been posted to my comments three times now. There is nothing but contempt to confront here. Let it so be that NASA will confront nothing but contempt where it has strewn violence and bloodshed in the name of "science." Amen.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFriends and Folks, it looks as if I'm a pure idiot, because I put up links, they don't work, I put up corrections, but then it looks as if I'm putting up the same stuff over and over. What the moderator isn't telling you is that after each of my postings, somebody puts up a spam advert for merchandise. So, I complain, SciAmer takes it down and leaves my naked posts, without any responses whatsoever. It's a game, because they don't want their scientistic dogma contradicted. That is not a peanut-shaped asteroid. It's ATTACHED TO A LARGE SPHERE, which in the original photos is unlit. Please notice however, that the Peanut IS ARTIFICIALLY LIT! And there's a whole PLAZA around it, which the photographing entity didn't bother to notice. Piffle.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaving taken Earth science, I can make plenty of guesses that are probably wrong but more plausible than "NASA lies" about why that asteroid has a smooth part. Any rock that breaks apart will have extremely smooth surfaces where it broke, almost glass-like smoothness. We broke rocks in class just to demonstrate this fact. Also, it'd be smooth if anything else crashed into it, the smooth part of the asteroid might be an impact crater of some sort.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbout bar magnets and the asteroid being part of a whole planet... all I'm going to say is stop eating paint chips.
I RE-developed the photos, and you can see a civil plaza below spreading out into a sphere. You want to accuse me of eating paint chips? Wow. Contempt for skill is not Science. Look at the damned photos in color. Duh!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.freecommonlaw.us/images/plans/AsHartley2.png
www.freecommonlaw.us/images/plans/AsHart2B.png
Or what was left from a neutron star thats accumulated some corrosion since it was knocked off balance. It almost appears to have a bi-polar shape to it like magnetized bars do, one north, one south.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.freecommonlaw.us/images/plans/ASHart2D.jpg
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is no "real science" here, just scientistic dogma.
That "asteroid," artificially lit, is attached to a larger sphere. Duh!
Where did you get access to the original photos, and how do you 'redevelop' a photo?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes NASA have any theory about what this is? Assuming it is not a fake, it really looks like a spherical mass stretched out by rotation into two sections, with the smooth middle being where the newly exposed material hasn't yet had time to accumulate many impacts from space debris. Why does everyone (well, someone, repeated over and over) need so desperately to believe it is a faked picture? What would that accomplish? An attempt to get people to rent storefront space in the plaza?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this