“Only three major main belt asteroids, Ceres, Vesta and Lutetia, have been imaged with a high level of detail so far,” said astronomer Pierre Vernazza of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille in France. 2021).
Astronomers managed to photograph these 42 asteroids because they were visited by NASA’s Dawn and Rosetta space missions and the European Space Agency.
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Last month, researchers revealed images of a strange, dog-bone-shaped asteroid called Cleopatra. The data reveal that Cleopatra’s two moons may have formed from dust ejected by the asteroid itself.
While Ceres, the largest object investigated in the survey with a diameter of 940 kilometers has a fairly round shape. Vesta, the second largest with a diameter of 520 kilometers, has a more uneven shape.
Flora and Adeona, having diameters of 146 and 144 kilometers, respectively, are also quite round. For Sylvia has a size of about 274 kilometers with an elongated shape with a density of about 1.3 grams per cubic centimeter, about the same density as coal.
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Asteroid the densest are Psyche and Kalliope, with densities of 3.9 and 4.4 grams per cubic centimeter, respectively. This density is higher than that of diamond which indicates that the composition of the asteroid consists of iron and rock.
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