People seemed to like my earlier diary introducing the first images of Main Belt asteroid 4 Vesta - the 2nd largest asteroid (technically, a "dwarf planet") in the solar system. Well, there have been some more images - much more awesome ones! And I had some additional thoughts to share about an underappreciated, downright mistreated planet in our solar system.
Cue the Big Bopper...Helllllooooo baaaaaabay!
There is a movie of a full-rotation showing Vesta's regular oblong shape here. I have no idea why they wouldn't put the clip in an embeddable format.
Hopefully we'll get some true color images soon - we know from Hubble telescope imagery that Vesta has an orange/brownish coloration due to ices. It'll be fascinating to see how that looks in detail.
Anyway, I was thinking about what NASA should do for its next deep space probes, and a disturbing thought occurred to me: There are two other blue planets in our solar system (Uranus and Neptune), neither of which have been visited by spacecraft in over a generation - Uranus in 25 years, Neptune in 22 years - and neither of which have ever been visited by dedicated spacecraft capable of doing detailed exploration in the way that the Galileo probe did of Jupiter and Cassini-Huygens at Saturn. In the case of Neptune, that's an absolute crime - just take a gander at this bad mama:
We've been looking at those pictures for 22 years, and no proposal for a dedicated probe has yet managed to get through the process. Among its dozen or so moons is one of the most interesting objects in the solar system, Triton. This system should be explored.
But I at least have some level of faith that Neptune will be explored eventually. Uranus, on the other hand...can you imagine the titters if NASA announced a probe to Uranus? People already ignore the planet just because its name is so embarrassing - we have to pronounce it either as yur-anus or urine-us. And I don't suppose it helps the homophobic giggle factor that its moons are all named after Shakespeare characters. Miranda, for instance, has some of the jaggedest features in the solar system.
And yet it's the next most massive object in the solar system to Earth in increasing order. The radiation environment of the planet is very benign compared to Jupiter or Saturn. Its axis and ring system is nearly perpendicular to the normal orientation because of some massive, unknown collision in its past. It has five major moons and 27 satellites total. And you may think this looks bland, but I just think it looks mysterious:
Give a poorly-served planet a break: Probe Uranus. Probe it deep and hard. If NASA can handle the thought of losing a billion-dollar probe, it can bravely handle the talk show routines inspired by exploring an unfortunately-named planet. Then send another probe to Neptune, so we can say we've sent dedicated probes to every planet.
Now, I know what some people might say: Aren't there higher priorities in this horrible economy where people are suffering and so on and so forth? Well, obviously. We should raise taxes sufficiently to cover both those priorities and these ones. It's not like the tax-evading Republican bastards hoarding America's wealth are doing anything worthwhile with it, and I refuse to accept false dilemmas.
Anyway, I know this isn't a very substantive diary - but I am working on just such a one, and it's a bit tiring. Thought I'd relax a bit with this one.