| Title | NASA Solar Probe Snaps Elusive Asteroid Trails For The First Time | |
| Date | Friday December 13 2019, @04:59PM | |
| Author | chromas | |
| Topic | ||
| from the dept. | ||
The Parker Solar Probe, one of NASA's most extreme spacecraft, has been gathering data on our sun for the past year, revealing some unusual phenomena in the outer atmosphere. But solar science isn't the only feather in PSP's extremely hot hat. Astronomers at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have used the probe's specialized camera to detect the faint signal of an asteroid dust trail that has avoided detection for decades.
Parker is equipped with the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR), a suite of cameras built specifically for taking photos around the sun. Usually, light from the trail is obscured by the brightness of the sun, but the WISPR cameras are specially designed to filter out all that light, giving astronomers a chance to see the faint dust cloud trailing asteroid 3200 Phaethon.
Phaethon is a well-characterized and slightly bizarre asteroid, about 3.6 miles in width, that more closely resembles a comet. It travels closer to the sun than any other named asteroid but its trail is particularly visible near the star, because it's more densely packed. It also has a dark past.
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