Our best view yet of Pallas, the largest asteroid not yet visited by a spacecraft, reveals an extraordinarily violent history with numerous impacts, most likely due to its unusual orbit, a new study finds.
Massive asteroid Pallas has a violent, cratered past, study reveals : Read more
"Much remains unknown about this large asteroid. To shed light on Pallas' many mysteries, in a new study, scientists used the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research (
SPHERE) imager on the V
ery Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile to analyze the asteroid's shape and surface in unprecedented detail."
That is quite an image of Pallas. During April 2019, I tracked Pallas moving through Bootes using my 90-mm telescope (a bit more than 71x and 1-degree true FOV) including opposition on 06-April-2019, also later passing by Muphrid or Eta Bootis star, its retrograde motion ended 02-Jun-2019. Asteroid tracking with small telescopes can be much fun.
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