Asteroid collision photographed?

Hubble may have gotten photos of the aftereffects a head-on collision
between two asteroids:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...steroid-crash/

Pat

Pat Flannery wrote in news:L4CdnS-
hdakotatelephone:

Hubble may have gotten photos of the aftereffects a head-on collision
between two asteroids:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...steroid-crash/

And what a debris field! Han Solo couldn't navigate that on a bicycle.

--Damon

Damon Hill wrote:
And what a debris field! Han Solo couldn't navigate that on a bicycle.

Yeah, it's a neat photo. I wonder if the "star" at the leading edge of
it is one of the asteroids involved in the collision.

Pat

On Feb 5, 1:07*am, Pat Flannery wrote:
Damon Hill wrote:
And what a debris field! *Han Solo couldn't navigate that on a bicycle.

Yeah, it's a neat photo. I wonder if the "star" at the leading edge of
it is one of the asteroids involved in the collision.

"The main nucleus of the object, P/2010 A2, is actually located
outside its dust halo, something that’s never been seen in a comet-
like object before."

You may be on to something, Pat.

/dps

snidely wrote:
"The main nucleus of the object, P/2010 A2, is actually located
outside its dust halo, something that’s never been seen in a comet-
like object before."

You may be on to something, Pat.

It's either the asteroid, or its location is very coincidental in the
photograph.
I'm sure going to miss Hubble when it's gone; it really did give us some
amazing views of space objects, although I'm still queasy about NASA
"colorizing" the photos to make them more spectacular looking (the
colors are a _lot_ more subtle as they are transmitted down from the
telescope)
The person who really would have freaked on seeing the Hubble photos is
Chesley Bonestell; the Moon was a lot more boring looking than in his
paintings*, but the heavens were a lot wilder looking.

* Wernher von Braun to Bonestell as both watched the incoming video from
the first Apollo 11 EVA: "Don't worry Chesley, you were right...the Moon
was wrong."

Pat

On Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:36:14 -0800, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Hubble may have gotten photos of the aftereffects a head-on collision
between two asteroids:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...steroid-crash/

Sort of reminds me a B5 shadow vessel disintegrating.

me wrote:
On Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:36:14 -0800, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Hubble may have gotten photos of the aftereffects a head-on collision
between two asteroids:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/20...steroid-crash/

Sort of reminds me a B5 shadow vessel disintegrating.

The one that fell into the atmosphere of Jupiter or the one that got
clobbered from all sides by the Army Of Light?
The technology of the Shadow ships was interesting if you observed how
they worked in combat.
They were obviously made of a superconducting material that could take
huge amounts of energy in at any one point and use the entire surface
area of the ship to re-radiate it into space; so unless you could hit
most of its surface with energy at a high enough rate that it couldn't
re-radiate it as fast as it was coming in, the ship wouldn't overheat
and fail.
That was noticeable every time when they got hit with an energy weapon,
and the whole Shadow ship started glowing red over its entire surface.
The idea owed a lot to how the Langston Field worked in the book "The
Mote In God's Eye".
I always got a kick out of how the entry point to a hyperspace and its
exit point varied in color in B5 due to the redshift effect.
Someone was actually putting some thought into all this, God bless them.

Pat