Catalog Page for PIA17016

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.

PIA17016: Asteroid Family's Shattered Past (Artist Concept)

This artist's concept catastrophic collisions between asteroids located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter and how they have formed families of objects on similar orbits around the sun.

Mission:	Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)
Instrument:	WISE Telescope
Product Size:	4534 x 2550 pixels (w x h)
Produced By:	IPAC-Caltech
Full-Res TIFF:	PIA17016.tif (34.71 MB)
Full-Res JPEG:	PIA17016.jpg (696.8 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:

This artist's conception shows how families of asteroids are created. Over the history of our solar system, catastrophic collisions between asteroids located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter have formed families of objects on similar orbits around the sun.

New data from NASA's NEOWISE project, based on observations made by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), have revealed the sizes and reflectivity of members of these asteroids families. The findings are helping scientists better understand how the families formed and evolved.

NEOWISE is the asteroid-hunting portion of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission, which scanned the entire sky twice in infrared light before entering hibernation mode in 2011.

Image Credit:

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Image Addition Date:

2013-05-29