- Captain's Logs
- Feb 23, '22
- Sep 15, '17
- Sep 15, '15
- Jan 14, '15
- Dec 24, '14
- Jul 28, '14
- Jun 30, '14
- Nov 12, '13
- Jun 18, '13
- Dec 18, '12
- Jul 12, '12
- Apr 23, '12
- Nov 17, '11
- Jul 6, '11
- Nov 1, '10
- Sep 21, '09
- May 7, '09
- Apr 2, '09
- Mar 23, '09
- Dec 31, '08
- Nov 1, '08
- Jun 30, '08
- Mar 26, '08
- Dec 24, '07
- Oct 15, '07
- Mar 15, '07
- Dec 29, '06
- Sep 19, '06
- Jun 18, '06
- Mar 9, '06
- Dec 22, '05
- Jun 28, '05
- Jan 11, '05
- Dec 30, '04
- Nov 29, '04
- Oct 26, '04
- Sep 9, '04
- May 6, '04
- Feb 27, '04
- Dec 5, '03
- Nov 13, '03
- Nov 1, '02
- Mar 13, '02
- May 31, '01
- Oct 9, '00
- Feb 11, '00
- Sep 1, '99
 
|
 |
New Horizons Tracks an Asteroid
PIA 09230
Image 300 x 300:
JPEG 1 KB
PNG 32 KB
|
|
The two "spots" in this image are a composite of two images of asteroid 2002 JF56 taken on June 11 and June 12, 2006, with the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) component of the New Horizons Ralph imager. In the bottom image, taken when the asteroid was about 3.36 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) away from the spacecraft, 2002 JF56 appears like a dim star. At top, taken at a distance of about 1.34 million kilometers (833,000 miles), the object is more than a factor of six brighter. The best current, estimated diameter of the asteroid is approximately 2.5 kilometers.
The asteroid observation was a chance for the New Horizons team to test the spacecraft's ability to track a rapidly moving object. On June 13 New Horizons came to within about 102,000 kilometers of the small asteroid, when the spacecraft was nearly 368 million kilometers (228 million miles) from the Sun and about 273 million kilometers (170 million miles) from Earth.
Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute |
|
