[meteorite-list] Stardust Flyby Images of Comet Wild 2

From: joseph_town_at_att.net <joseph_town_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 10:32:00 2004
Message-ID: <010820040824.28712.137_at_att.net>

Hi all,

I know I should research this myself but I hope I can get a relatively brief
answer upon which I can look further into this question if deemed worthwhile.
How does a small object like a comet, especially, travel for billions of
years constantly venting and releasing matter continue to exist? Why doesn't
it dissipate into virtual nothingness?

Bill Kieskowski



 
> Hi,
>
> I was fascinated by the first flyby image that was
> released (the one featured on APOD). Despite its generally
> fuzzy appearance, there is a lot of detail buried in there
> that I hope we'll get to see when the wizards are through
> massaging the images for detail and content.
> I took a copy of that image and squeezed it as hard as I
> could. I doubled the spacing of all the pixels and filled in
> the intermediate spaces with eight-way median values, twiddled
> with its histogram to re-distribute the greyscale values to a
> more normal distribution, then stomped all over it with a
> square sharpness filter.
> I found that is LOTS of detail there, although my
> ham-handed efforts left some messy artifacts. For example, the
> "crater-like" circular features do not have uniformly shaded
> bottoms. They're not smooth (nor flat I would guess), but
> usually show a single deep dark conoid pit that's probably a
> large primary vent for outgassing.
> The walls of these "crater-like" features show some linear
> features, as if the depressions had formed by a slump-like
> collapse, perhaps from the rapid removal of material from
> beneath the "slump" by outgassing. Lots of tantalizing
> features not quite sharp enough to interpret. I'm left with
> the impression of a surface with lots of varying contours.
> Many of the smaller high contrast features seem to be
> albedo-related, as if between light and dark materials,
> perhaps at smaller "un-slumped" vents.
> If anyone's interested, you can view this roughly enhanced
> image at:
> <http://www.bhil.com/~kelly/wild2.html>.
>
>
> Sterling K. Webb
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Ron Baalke wrote:
>
> I've added an animation of the Comet Wild 2 flyby
> images taken by
> Stardust to the Stardust website.
> Included is a chart from the Dust Flux Instrument
> showing
> the particle impacts on the spacecraft during the
> flyby, and
> another chart showing the spacecraft thruster
> activity:
>
> http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/status/040106.html
>
> You can view the animation directly from here:
>
> http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/images/w2_flyby1.gif
>
> Ron Baalke
>
>
>
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Received on Thu 08 Jan 2004 03:24:52 AM PST