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posted by paulej72 on Friday June 12 2015, @05:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the fly-me-to-the-moon-and-let-me-play-among-the-stars dept.

NASA has released a dramatic new video of the dwarf planet Ceres.

The black-and-white animation lets viewers fly around the mysterious orb from an altitude of 8,400 miles, compressing the nine-hour Cererian day into 75 seconds. It was assembled from 80 images taken by the space agency's Dawn spacecraft.

You can read about the video or just go straight to it.

Presumably to make the video more dramatic, they exaggerated the vertical profile by a factor of two and they added a star field to the background.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by VortexCortex on Friday June 12 2015, @05:35PM

    by VortexCortex (4067) on Friday June 12 2015, @05:35PM (#195462)

    The exaggerated vertical relief makes Ceres seem a lot smaller than it is.

    It wouldn't have been hard to set the displacement map factor back to one and render out a video for those of us who are used to looking at photos of celestial objects, esp. Earth's moon. Compare the appearance in the video to this still shot of Ceres. [nasa.gov] Perhaps they thought it looked too much like our moon? If the reliefs were for studying topographic features they would have set the surface displacement multiplier higher.

    It must be hell working in the media arm of NASA. On the one hand you want to give the public the most accurate info possible while on the other hand you need to sensationalize findings to capture the attention of the masses to help ensure funding, and on the gripping hand you know its a small fraction of the population who even cares enough to understand the significance of what NASA has accomplished no matter how sensational or accurate the presentation.

    Ceres holds more water than Earth, and makes up ~1/3 the mass of the asteroid belt (it's orbiting in a swarm of gravity-tax-free raw building material). If we are ever to colonize space Ceres will be the key.

    Perhaps we'll find out what those bright spots are when Dawn closes to an orbit of 230 miles (375 km) near the end of its observations which are scheduled to end this month (June, 2015).

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  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday June 12 2015, @06:00PM

    by Freeman (732) on Friday June 12 2015, @06:00PM (#195467) Journal

    BEGIN SARCASM Don't worry those bright spots are pure plutonium making Ceres completely useless for all future space colonization efforts . . . END SARCASM

    --
    Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
  • (Score: 1) by Zz9zZ on Friday June 12 2015, @08:31PM

    by Zz9zZ (1348) on Friday June 12 2015, @08:31PM (#195528)

    I know what you mean! My brain did a double take thinking that Ceres is remarkably spherical for how big it looks.

    And we all know the bright spots are the secret nazi bases they show on the documentary... iron sky?

    --
    ~Tilting at windmills~
  • (Score: 1) by sysd on Sunday June 14 2015, @12:20AM

    by sysd (1769) on Sunday June 14 2015, @12:20AM (#195921)

    >The exaggerated vertical relief makes Ceres seem a lot smaller than it is.
    I started to get flashbacks to these guys from the early seventies:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HArUmqqiL0s&feature=youtu.be&t=37s [youtube.com]

    But yes, not an easy job working for the media arm of NASA.