Ground-based images of asteroid Lutetia complement spacecraft flyby
Thursday, October 7, 2010 - 08:30
in Astronomy & Space
The European Space Agency (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft beamed back to Earth dramatic close-up images on July 10, 2010, as it flew past the 100-kilometer-sized asteroid (21) Lutetia on its way to a comet rendezvous in 2014. But even before Rosetta's encounter with Lutetia, an international team of astronomers, using three of the world's largest telescopes, were busy making its own assessment of the asteroid's shape and size, as well as searching for satellites. The pre-flyby images are being compared this week with those from Rosetta at a meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, Calif., revealing that the ground-based images are amazingly accurate.