SMD Is Sitting on Cool Hubble Pictures Again
The Shape and Surface Variation of 2 Pallas from the Hubble Space Telescope, Science (subscription required)
“Fig. 1 Deconvolved 336-nm WFPC2 images of Pallas from 8 September 2007. We observed Pallas at an angular size of 0.326 arc sec and a phase of 4.2, resulting in a scale of ~75 km/pixel. Pallas’ spin pole (pointing upward) and south pole () are marked, and the corresponding sub-Earth longitude is labeled; north is up and east is right in this panel.”
Keith’s note: Cool and unprecedented high resolutions images of asteroid 2 Pallas appear in this week’s issue of Science – images taken by Hubble way back in 2007. Up until now this world has been just a point of light. Why has NASA not released these images before? Why is there no press release now? Why do people need to go to a for-fee site to see them? How many more is SMD sitting on? It would seem that UCLA and/or Science selectively gave advanced notice of this story and NASA-funded imagery to a hand picked group – but not the rest of the media – or the general public. What does this have to say about the Administration’s call for transparency and openness? Not much, it would seem.
