Can Radio Telescopes Capture Detailed Images of Asteroids and Their Moons?

[Andy Resnick]

Asteroid 2004-B186 is passing by this evening (monday), with a maximum magnitude 9.5 (visible with bionculars/small telescopes). Here's a chart:

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/images/2004bl86_starchart.jpg

Hoping for a (reasonably) clear evening...

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Someone here has to get a photo! @davenn @russ_watters

 

[davenn]

wall to wall cloudy with rain here in eastern Australia :(

 

[DaveC426913]

Hm. 10 degrees of movement per 4 hours.

Not fast enough to be discernible to the eye, except if really close to some background stars.

 

[davenn]

Hm. 10 degrees of movement per 4 hours.

Not fast enough to be discernible to the eye, except if really close to some background stars.

but easily picked up in photo's say 10 - 15 minutes apart :)

D

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

The Asteroid That Flew Past Earth Tuesday Has Its Own Moon
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way...that-flew-past-earth-tuesday-has-its-own-moon

 

[davenn]

The "Cloudy Nights" astro forum I'm on has a guy that posted his video of the asteroid to Youtube...



his comments in the forum are as follows ...

Pretty much sacrificed everything to optimize the video. Somebody better than me could probably separate the asteroid, process the background, then merge back the asteroid.
Celestron 80ED, Sony NEX5T, 3 second jpgs (the jpg format was a futile effort to minimize stuttering). ISO 6400 to keep the individual exposures short. Video made by PIPP, compressed with AVS video converter for upload.
Thanks to SergeC, whose lovely picture inspired me to press on when I thought I'd messed up (just imaged for a while before and after, this is 300 frames from 600 taken), Astronewb for his excellent stuff on the ZEQ25, TorstenEdlmann for pointing out the virtues of PIPP for another purpose, and tazer for the intervalometer program that drives the NEX.
Best viewed full screen, the asteroid enters on the lower edge, 2/3 left.

so cool! :)

cheers
Dave

 

[Creator]

Pretty awesome radio-photos , Greg. I was unaware about such small asteroids having moons... Furthermore, that is an incredible series of shots, and showing great detail. I wish they would have given the time between each frame so we could determine the rotation rate; it appears to be a shot from directly above the rotation axis.. However, I am sort of stumped as to how they got such high resolution...down to several meters using a radio telescope.?. Yikes; Wasn't this thing almost 3 times the lunar distance. I find it hard to believe Goldstone can even get that sort of resolution on the lunar surface...I' certainly have never seen such. Maybe I'm just not up to date on radio imaging.