Here is an article about the upcoming search for earth trojans at the L4 point which is just about to get underway:

Asteroid sleuth

MapCam view of the Jupiter system from the Earth Trojan asteroid search. From left to right, Callisto, Jupiter, Io and Europa. Released on Valentine's Day nonetheless! Is OSIRIS-REx sending a message to Juno?

Click to view attachment

You can see the belts in this one! Another reminder that Polycam is powerful!
http://www.asteroidmission.org/?latest-new...r-image-jupiter

The search for Earth Trojan asteroids came up empty...

Article

Spacecraft spotted! http://www.asteroidmission.org/?latest-new...ft-since-launch

I'm sure it must be mentioned somewhere, any plans for the spacecraft to do some imagery of its own?

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/a...shot-past-earth

Closest approach has passed, and according to DSN, they made contact and are downlinking...

Vídeo fron NASA Science Casts : Riding the slingshot to Bennu

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/scien...ngshot-to-bennu

First Earth image released! https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/...th-during-flyby

And for comparison, an image from EPIC on board DSCOVR, around the same time: https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/natural/...70922224114.png

I have to admit a bit of surprise at the quality. Are these images actually circular rather than rectangular? And can we expect those drop outs (?) as the "norm"?

Not sure what you mean by this.

Did you actually read the caption?

"The dark vertical streaks at the top of the image are caused by short exposure times (less than three milliseconds). Short exposure times are required for imaging an object as bright as Earth, but are not anticipated for an object as dark as the asteroid Bennu, which the camera was designed to image."

That said, I'm not sure why short exposure times would cause streaking like that -- maybe blooming from the horizontal register?

I'd guess the jagged limb Earth displays indicating this is an orthographic projection (due to noticeable s/c motion or whatever) instead of a straight-up RGB composite.

I thought they were truncated lines due to undercompression. We saw that with Galileo and Cassini, though on Cassini, we had truncated lines every other line to allow for interpolation.

I thought it might have been a reprojection as well but you can see some of the image goes above the limb of the planet on the upper-left side. I'm at work right now so I don't have the ability to circle it in an image, I'm afraid. The whole picture looks like it was taken through a circular window that's slightly misaligned/off-centre with Earth.

I guess this is what Hungry's referring to - this is a gamma-tweaked crop:
Click to view attachment
You can see that it looks like the image was masked to black outside a circle. It's noticable at the top of the frame because the mask follows the true edge of the Earth which is in shadow there (the phase is slightly gibbous) rather than the visible limb.

Presumably this was done to get rid of some noise in the black regions. Hopefully they didn't mask out too much of the bright limb, but the bright limb looks too sharp (ie it looks aliased) rather than PSF-y as you'd expect...

more pics. including the Moon
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/o...th-and-the-moon

Earth anf Moon in color
http://www.asteroidmission.org/?latest-new...arth-moon-color

Late reply, but fantastic image. reminds me of Carl Sagan's famous 'pale blue dot' quote:

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam"

I'm seriously missing Cassini-Huygens, but starting to get excited about this mission now - I wonder what Bennu will be like? Itokawa-esque? Similar to Eros? Mathilde? Gaspra?

Hoping that there's a suitable place to take a sample without hazardous terrain - an area of 'ponding' perhaps, that's free of large boulders or gravel that's too large for the sample-arm to capture.

Only seven months away now....

August 17th 2018,
Osiris Rex officially started the Approach Phase to Bennu,

https://www.asteroidmission.org/asteroid-operations/

NASA Teleconference today at 2pm Eastern

NASA to Host Media Briefing on Mission to Return Asteroid Sample to Earth
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-...sample-to-earth

Hi folks, just doing a little thread maintenance. I created a new forum for OSIRIS-REx, and am closing this early thread. Please move on to the Asteroid Approach thread to discuss science operations!