Come on, let's go for flight over the dwarf planet Ceres!
January 29, 2016 11:25 AM   Subscribe

Look out the window and be sure you don't miss the neat stuff!

The images are from Dawn's Framing Camera (a German contribution), taken August-October 15, when the spacecraft was mapping the planet (excuse me, dwarf planet) from an orbit of 900 miles (that's 1,450 km to everyone in the world except Burma, Liberia, and the US)

What's up with blue patches of color in the image you ask? That's easy, these are false color images and the blue indicates parts of the surface that are young, while the greyer areas are older. Yep, those colors are mixed and matched like a drunk Genesis Device . SCIENCE!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (7 comments total) 7 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thor sure worked that place over, forging it, huh?
posted by Oyéah at 11:38 AM on January 29, 2016


You can have your hoverboards and your jet packs, I am perfectly happy with a future that includes video of flights over other planets and photos of Martian sunsets.
posted by bondcliff at 11:46 AM on January 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Come on, let's go for flight fight over the dwarf planet Ceres!

Desh tim detim mang im mowsh leva sif xox, Beratna.
posted by leotrotsky at 12:01 PM on January 29, 2016


these are false color images

I'm having my doubts about the veracity of that audio track too.
posted by fairmettle at 12:15 PM on January 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


This looks...almost to fake to be real. Are those star fields in the background legit or were they digitally added?

That said, the folks working on The Expanse should have so new effects to play with.
posted by fremen at 12:29 PM on January 29, 2016


Fremen, that video is rendered. They took data from the pictures sent back by the satellite and created a 3D model of Ceres, and then produced that video by flying a virtual camera over the surface of the virtual Ceres. The starfield in the back ground makes is so that we "know" that the camera is moving, not the dwarf planet.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:35 PM on January 29, 2016


Aside from being uncomfortable for any crew on the camera ship, the point of view flying around in tight circles at what must be hundreds of km/s leads to "that thing looks tiny for a planet!" on a scale I haven't experienced since Star Trek Voyager.

Quite the landscape, though.
posted by sfenders at 5:18 PM on January 29, 2016


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