Mineralogical Mapping of Asteroid 4 Vesta with HST/NICMOS: First Results

Details Mineralogical Mapping of Asteroid 4 Vesta with HST/NICMOS: First Results Mineralogical Mapping of Asteroid 4 Vesta with HST/NICMOS: First Results

Oct 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000dps....32.0805c&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS Meeting #32, #08.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 32, p.1003

Physics

Optics

Scientific paper

Being the biggest asteroid with a reasonably intact basaltic crust, 4 Vesta is a pivotal object to the understanding of the early history of the Solar System. Attempts to map the mineralogical variations on its surface include earth-based spectroscopy on the 0.8-2.5μ m range as well as disk-resolved observations with the HST between 0.4-1.0μ m and JHK imaging with adaptive optics with the Keck Telescope. However,the observations of 4 Vesta during the 1997 opposition with the HST/NICMOS are the first to combine spatial resolution and full rotational coverage with a set of filters that covers the most mineralogically relevant spectral features of HED assemblages. The NICMOS data were all acquired within a 5-day interval, with Vesta's sub-earth latitude varying from -2.8 to -3.5o. Narrow-band filters centered on 0.9536, 1.1298, 1.606, 1.8986 and 2.1641 μ m and medium-band filters on 1.4556 and 2.2181 μ m were used. For each filter, full rotational coverage was obtained, with increments of ~ 20o of longitude. The resulting 144 frames were initially reduced with CALNICA and then PSF-calibrated with the Iterative Blind Deconvolution algorithm. This algorithm, coded on the program IDAC, performs PSF deconvolution through the physically constrained iterative minimization of an error metric. The high signal-to-noise of the data allowed us to achieve super-resolution. Here we compare the first results of the deconvolution with previous results on the surface mineralogy of 4 Vesta. Further developments of this work will lead to the first mineralogical map of 4 Vesta on the 0.95-2.2μ m range. J. Carvano was supported by a CNPq fellowship.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Mineralogical Mapping of Asteroid 4 Vesta with HST/NICMOS: First Results does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Mineralogical Mapping of Asteroid 4 Vesta with HST/NICMOS: First Results, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Mineralogical Mapping of Asteroid 4 Vesta with HST/NICMOS: First Results will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-865559