Buried treasures in the asteroid belt - A German camera on the Dawn space probe is providing fundamental information on the formation of planets from Vesta and Ceres

DLR German Aerospace Center
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Buried treasures in the asteroid belt - A German camera on the Dawn space probe is providing fundamental information on the formation of planets from Vesta and Ceres


Ten years ago, NASA's Dawn space probe embarked on a mission destined to become one of the most exciting and scientifically productive in the history of the unmanned exploration of the Solar System. Dawn has explored two of the largest bodies in the asteroid belt: the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. On board is a German camera system – the 'framing camera'. The camera was specially developed for this mission by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the DLR Institute of Planetary Research and the Institute of Computer and Network Engineering at the Technical University of Braunschweig. DLR is responsible for evaluating the images, processing the stereo-image data into global maps, and generating digital terrain models from which the topography of the two bodies can be derived with a precision of a few metres.


Full article with images: http://www.dlr.de/dlr/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-10081/151_read-24347/year-all/#/gallery/28537

DLR Dawn Special:
www.dlr.de/en/dawn


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