2010 news images

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From time to time, as relevant images about minor objects currently in the news become available from observers or from public news sources, we include one with a brief caption at the top of our daily news. This page catalogs the images posted this year along with their captions and links. (Jump to latest for this year.)

23 January 2010 First observations from the WISE infrared space telescope were reported yesterday with its January 12th discovery of asteroid 2010 AB78. Due to fixed pointing from polar orbit along Earth's day-night terminator, immediate ground-based confirmation of coming WISE discoveries will be critical. Illustration courtesy of the WISE mission.	28 January 2010 WISE has a second asteroid discovery, 2009 AG79 announced here. In this earlier infrared imagery, first discovery 2010 AB78 shows red against background stars. Queried about whether this was the first asteroidal object discovered from space, Gareth Williams at the IAU Minor Planet Center noted to A/CC that that milestone belongs to WISE's predecessor IRAS, which discovered Main Belter 3728 IRAS (1983 QF) and NEO 3200 Phaeton (1983 TB) a quarter century ago. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA
3 February 2010 HubbleSite reported yesterday that Hubble Space Telescope images from last week of comet-like object P/2010 A2 (the bright point at lower left) "suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids" in the Main Belt. See also David Jewitt's P/2010A (LINEAR) page and today's latest astrometry. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA).	3 May 2010 The Cornell Chronicle reports that last month Arecibo radar found 2005 YU55 to be about 400 meters in diameter. Good to know, considering that 1) the original estimate from optical observation was on the order of 143 meters and 2) this object is coming back in 18 months, passing closer than the Moon. Fortunately, Arecibo's observations eliminated all 2005 YU55 impact possibilities for the next hundred years. Image credit: NASA/Cornell/Arecibo.
26 May 2010 NASA JPL reports that the WISE wide-field infrared telescope operating in Earth polar orbit has been discovering asteroids at the rate of "about a hundred a day" since January, mostly in the Main Belt but including "more than 50" total near Earth, and "has also bagged about a dozen new comets." Credit: January image of M3 with comet C/2008 Q3 (Garradd), NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE.	29 May 2010 It was reported yesterday that the U.S.-German joint NASA-DLR SOFIA airborne observatory saw (nighttime in-flight) first light on May 26th. These images of the 2.5-meter, 17-ton infrared telescope and the much modified Boeing 747SP aircraft are credited to NASA/Dryden, Tom Tschida from May 20th (left) and Jim Ross from April 14th this year.
4 June 2010 Anthony Wesley in New South Wales, Australia reported yesterday on IceInSpace.com.au that "at approximately 20:30utc this morning I recorded a large fireball on Jupiter." This is the same amateur who discovered an impact plume on Jupiter one year ago next month. That event was followed up by many observers, including with the Hubble Space Telescope, about which a news item was coincidentally released yesterday. SpaceWeather.com is reporting that Christopher Go in the Philippines also recorded the flash. Image from Anthony Wesley from 2031:29 UTC (north is up, tilted).	11 June 2010 A new study announced yesterday (also here) argues that "more than 90 percent of the observed Oort cloud comets have an extra-solar origin" (acquired from neighboring stellar nursery protoplanetary disks). One probable Oort Cloud object is 1P/Halley, seen here between background star trails as its dark inactive nucleus was outward bound seven years ago at 28.06 times Earth's distance from the Sun. Credit ESO, observation by Olivier Hainaut with three 8-meter telescopes for three nights at Cerro Paranal in Chile to capture Halley at magnitude V=28.2.
14 June 2010 The Japanese Hayabusa asteroid sample return mission arrived late yesterday evening over Woomera, Australia (1351 UTC). Its small re-entry capsule is the bright point at lower right while the trailing larger spacecraft destructs, hitting the atmosphere at the superorbital speed of natural meteors. Image by staff and students of the Clay Center Observatory aboard a NASA aircraft, posted by NASA/Ames' observing campaign. BBC has a report today on the successful capsule recovery, and [new] also see this. Read more from earlier here and here.	16 June 2010 The European Space Agency yesterday previewed the coming July 10th Rosetta flyby of Main Belt asteroid 21 Lutetia, which the mission studied distantly in January 2007. This object's properties are poorly understood but it is considerably larger than Main Belter 2867 Steins, flown past in September 2008. These two Rosetta OSIRIS shots of Steins are similar enough to "free view" (defocus your eyes and let the two fuse into a third) in 3D. ©Copyright 2008 ESA.
17 June 2010 First noticed at Emily Lakdawalla's Planetary Society Blog yesterday is that Japan's space agency has posted images of successful solar sail deployment by its Ikaros spacecraft, which was launched last month into heliocentric orbit. The sail is 20 meters across diagonally and 0.0075mm thick. This is a technology test for a proposed mission to explore Jupiter Trojan asteroids. Image ©copyright 2010 JAXA.	18 June 2010 The University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy announced June 16th that "The world became a slightly safer place on May 13, when the Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) telescope in Hawaii started surveying the sky for killer asteroids" (see also partner news here, here, and here, and see PS1 Status Reports for some details). This photo by Rob Ratkowski shows PS1 atop Haleakala before sunrise with distant Mauna Kea. New: We note that the most recent published PS1 observations are from late February, appearing in the March 26th DOU MPEC. Andrea Milani addressed the PS1 NEO productivity issue today on the Minor Planet Mailing List (MPML).
19 June 2010 Yes, we have NO impact plume. That's this past week's report from the Hubble Space Telescope, which followed up the amateur-observed June 3rd event. Probably "a giant meteor burning up high above Jupiter's cloud tops ... best guess [is that these] smallest detectable events may happen as frequently as every few weeks." Image credit: NASA, ESA, and observers.	10 July 2010 No longer just a point of light, Main Belt asteroid 21 Lutetia today becomes the largest asteroid yet visited as the Rosetta mission flies past. For more info about flyby progress and resources, see the Rosetta blog. This image is from the OSIRIS imaging system Narrow Angle Camera yesterday when 2 million km. from the target, ©copyright ESA 2010.
11 July 2010 Of 243,553 numbered minor objects, this is number 21: Main Belt asteroid Lutetia, which was discovered from a Paris apartment balcony in 1852 and was flown past yesterday by the Rosetta comet mission. Credit: ESA OSIRIS team.	19 July 2010 This montage by Emily Lakdawalla, in its large full version with or without text, shows the image and relative size of every asteroid and comet visited by space missions to date -- eight solitary asteroids, one asteroid with a satellite, and four comet nuclei. The big rock is the just visited Main Belter, 21 Lutetia, and the smallest object, NEO 25143 Itokawa, doesn't show in this thumbnail. Credit: Numerous NASA and ESA space missions and imaging teams.
29 July 2010 There's a new hole in the Moon, shown this week by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Camera team, apparently one of five such discoveries mentioned in a July 27th Nature News report. This ten-meter crater on the northeast edge of Mare Tranquillitatis on the Moon's near side appeared between the August 1971 Apollo 15 image (left) and LRO's September 2009 image. NASA has had a program involving amateur observers since 2005 watching for such impacts (PDF with 200+ candidates). See also news from last September about fresh Mars craters. Credit: NASA/GSFC/ASU LRO Camera.	11 August 2010 NASA JPL reported yesterday that the WISE infrared space telescope is warming up after depleting coolant and has lost its most sensitive detector. But, after last month completing its primary mission to map the entire sky, there is still enough coolant left to map perhaps half the sky again. Illustration courtesy of the WISE mission.
14 August 2010 Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo this week reported their discovery of the first known trailing Neptune Trojan, 2008 LC18, using the Japanense Subaru 8.3-meter telescope on Mauna Kea to watch for such objects traversing a dark dusty area against the bright galactic background. They previously discovered half of the six known Neptune leading Trojans, and predict that there are more large bodies in this L4/L5 population than in the Main Asteroid Belt. Image courtesy of the discoverers.	18 August 2010 No Vulcanoids yet, the Messenger mission reported yesterday. The spacecraft, which launched six years ago and goes into orbit around Mercury next March, has been engaged in a multi-perihelion campaign to find a theoretical population of asteroids between Mercury and the Sun. See more info here. This May 6th image of the Earth-Moon system comes from that search. Credit NASA/JHUAL/CIW (NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ. Applied Physics Laboratory, and Carnegie Inst. of Washington).
20 August 2010 This Hubble Space Telescope image of 4 Vesta is from May three years ago. In May of next year the ion-propelled Dawn spacecraft will begin maneuvering to be captured into orbit around Vesta, bringing the second largest Main Belt object into sharp view by July. See Science@NASA's preview report from yesterday. Image credit: NASA, ESA, L. McFadden, and G. Bacon.	23 August 2010 There may have been another Jupiter impact, caught by amateur observer Masayuki Tachikawa in Japan around 1822 UT on August 20th. See Emily Lakdawalla's report for more info and links. Sky & Telescope reports no debris plume has been spotted during two subsequent Jupiter rotations, but corroboration has come from two other event observers in Japan. Image courtesy of M. Tachikawa (Ganymede at lower right, north is up).
3 September 2010 It was reported yesterday that, in the course of a "warm mode" program to survey NEO physical characteristics via infrared, the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) has found "a surprisingly wide array of compositions" among the first 100 of 700 objects planned (about 10% of the known population). Artwork credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt.