{"id":37116,"date":"2011-07-17T15:46:17","date_gmt":"2011-07-17T15:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/dawn-approaches-bad-astronomy\/"},"modified":"2011-07-17T15:46:17","modified_gmt":"2011-07-17T15:46:17","slug":"dawn-approaches-bad-astronomy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/dawn-approaches-bad-astronomy.php","title":{"rendered":"Dawn approaches | Bad Astronomy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The spacecraft Dawn is now just one day away from entering orbit around the asteroid Vesta, the second-largest in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. On July 9th, it snapped <a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/mission_pages\/dawn\/multimedia\/dawn-image-070911.html\">this photo<\/a> of the rock, from just over 40,000 km (24,000 miles) away: <\/p><p><a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/images\/content\/569937main_dawn-image-070911-43_full.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/be33c_dawn_vesta_july92011.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"610\" height=\"452\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-34641\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/a><\/p><p>As far as I can tell, this is the highest resolution image of Vesta ever taken! Vesta is a slightly flattened mildly-lumpy spheroid with a diameter of about 530 km (260 miles), and you can see it&rsquo;s peppered with impact craters, as expected. It may just be the lighting, but they look shallower than I would&rsquo;ve thought. Sometimes that happens when the impacted body is soft, like ice or loosely packed material &mdash; though we know the surface is rocky. Maybe it&rsquo;s powdery, like the Moon&rsquo;s surface? There are grooves, too, possibly cracks in the surface. Stress fractures from an impact?<\/p><p>It&rsquo;s too early for me to speculate much, and I&rsquo;m no expert, but this certainly whets my appetite to see what happens when Dawn slips into orbit and starts taking high-res images of the surface!<\/p><p>That will happen tomorrow, when I am at The ...<\/p><p><a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/L04KE-PB0jnFLboBYL9FNeCI_Fw\/0\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/be33c_di\" border=\"0\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/a><br><a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/feedads.g.doubleclick.net\/~a\/L04KE-PB0jnFLboBYL9FNeCI_Fw\/1\/da\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/be33c_di\" border=\"0\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/a><\/p><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/be33c_8i6mT8IfEHw\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/wp-o-matic\/cache\/be33c_jx1xKForAMI\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\" style=\"padding-left:10px; padding-right: 10px;\"><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The spacecraft Dawn is now just one day away from entering orbit around the asteroid Vesta, the second-largest in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. On July 9th, it snapped this photo of the rock, from just over 40,000 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/astronomy\/dawn-approaches-bad-astronomy.php\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"limit_modified_date":"","last_modified_date":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"modified_by":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37116"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.euvolution.com\/futurist-transhuman-news-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}