Monday, June 17, 2013

How do they know it's red?


More on asteroid QE2, which gave us a pass close enough to allow radar imaging just a short while ago.  It turned out that it had a moonlet.  Now, they imaged the asteroid with radar, which allowed the discovery of surface features and the orbiting moonlet. And it turned out that this was a whole new kind of asteroid than anything they'd seen before.

Last I checked, radar data wasn't in color.   So I was a bit confused by the following statement.

“Asteroid QE2 is dark, red, and primitive — that is, it hasn’t been heated or melted as much as other asteroids," Arecibo's Ellen Howell said in a statement. "QE2 is nothing like any asteroid we've visited with a spacecraft, or plan to, or that we have meteorites from. It's an entirely new beast in the menagerie of asteroids near Earth."
 So I'd like that explained a bit further.


Asteroid 1998 QE2 Radar Images Reveal Near-Earth Space Rock To Be 'Entirely New Beast,' Scientists Say 


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