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from slashdot: The article explains why the asteroid looks like a pixelated sprite taken from the era of Monkey Island. For those that didn't want to bother r
by zrgiu_ 15y ago
from slashdot:
The article explains why the asteroid looks like a pixelated sprite taken from the era of Monkey Island.
For those that didn't want to bother reading both articles and just wanted to have a look at the image but then thought "WTF" after having a look at it:
"The individual pulses can be timed very accurately as well, so that the shape of the asteroid can be determined, too. If there is a bump on the asteroid, like a hill, then a pulse hitting that won’t travel quite as far as a pulse that hits a crater. It gets back sooner, and this can be measured. The spatial resolution of this method at the distance of YU 55 will be about 4 meters, so they’ll be able to make an image that’s about 100 pixels across of it."
- ugh 15y agoI’m not really sure why that needs an explanation. All our imaging technologies have a certain maximum resolution. The asteroid is small and far away, ergo we are not going to get many pixels.
- mturmon 15y agoI agree, about resolution. But, people looking at the image may not understand it is a radar image, not an optical image. People might think that the highlights on the top of the image are sunlight, and the dark area below is shadow, but of course they're not, because radar doesn't care about sunlight. In fact, I'm not sure how they pseudo-colored the images. In vanilla radar imaging, you get the highest return off surfaces that are perpendicular to line of sight (generally speaking). Here's a (model) plane radar image: http://www.fhr.fraunhofer.de/fhr/site/drucken_c336_f4_en.html http://www.fhr.fraunhofer.de/fhr/site/drucken_c336_f4_en.htm... A lot of the radar imaging work is classified.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]