Here is a cool bit of space stuff I just stumbled over. You might remember Lutetia, the biggest asteroid visited by a spacecraft. You might also remember this pic I did, where Lutetia doesn’t look that big actually.
I’m swear! It’s way bigger. It was just so cold when the picture was taken.
Well, it always depends on what you compare things to. So over at The Planetary Society I found this chart of ALL asteroids visited by a spacecraft compared to each other. You may want to see the large version.
Click to enlarge… if it’s not big enough.
So yes, Lutetia is a fracking big hunk of metal after all. Little, cool detail: the tiniest asteroid on that chart is Itokawa. It’s still a couple of hundred meters long but compared to the other behemoths, it’s just a few pixels. But that tiny rock is special because Itokawa was the asteroid that the Japanese probe Hayabusa might have brought material from! You see, it all makes sense now.
