PDS logoPlanetary Data System
PDS Information
Find a Node - Use these links to navigate to any of the 8 publicly accessible PDS Nodes.

This bar indicates that you are within the PDS enterprise which includes 6 science discipline nodes and 2 support nodes which are overseen by the Project Management Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Each node is led by an expert in the subject discipline, supported by an advisory group of other practitioners of that discipline, and subject to selection and approval under a regular NASA Research Announcement.
Click here to return to the Photojournal Home Page Click here to view a list of Photojournal Image Galleries Photojournal_inner_header
Latest Images  |  Spacecraft & Technology  |  Animations  |  Space Images App  |  Feedback  |  Photojournal Search  

PIA09230: New Horizons Tracks an Asteroid
The two 'spots' in this image are a composite of two images of asteroid 2002 JF56 taken on June 11 and June 12, 2006, with the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera component of the New Horizons Ralph imager.
 Target Name:  2002 JF56
 Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)
 Mission:  New Horizons 
 Spacecraft:  New Horizons
 Instrument:  MVIC 
 Product Size:  300 x 300 pixels (w x h) 
 Produced By:  Johns Hopkins University/APL 
 Full-Res TIFF:  PIA09230.tif (90.33 kB)
 Full-Res JPEG:  PIA09230.jpg (2.097 kB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

The two "spots" in this image are a composite of two images of asteroid 2002 JF56 taken on June 11 and June 12, 2006, with the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) component of the New Horizons Ralph imager. In the bottom image, taken when the asteroid was about 3.36 million kilometers (2.1 million miles) away from the spacecraft, 2002 JF56 appears like a dim star. At top, taken at a distance of about 1.34 million kilometers (833,000 miles), the object is more than a factor of six brighter. The best current, estimated diameter of the asteroid is approximately 2.5 kilometers.

The asteroid observation was a chance for the New Horizons team to test the spacecraft's ability to track a rapidly moving object. On June 13 New Horizons came to within about 102,000 kilometers of the small asteroid, when the spacecraft was nearly 368 million kilometers (228 million miles) from the Sun and about 273 million kilometers (170 million miles) from Earth.

Image Credit:
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Image Addition Date:
2007-04-02