Gaspra,
Deimos, and Phobos Comparison |
PIA00078
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This
montage shows asteroid 951 Gaspra (top) compared with Deimos (lower left)
and Phobos (lower right), the moons of Mars. The three bodies are shown
at the same scale and nearly the same lighting conditions. |
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Image
Credit: JPL,
NASA |
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Gaspra
is about 17 km long. All three bodies have irregular shapes, due to past
catastrophic conditions. However their surfaces appear remarkably different,
possibly because of differences in composition but most likely because of
very different impact histories. The Phobos and Deimos images were obtained
by the Viking Orbiter spacecraft in 1977; the Gaspra image is the best of
a series obtained by the Galileo spacecraft on October 29, 1991. |
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