page_title: 31 Euphrosyne
section_title: Gallery
hierarchical_section_title: 31 Euphrosyne / Gallery
caption_attribution_description: English: August 3, 2015 Asteroid Euphrosyne as Seen by WISE on May 17, 2010 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=pia19645 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4678 The asteroid Euphrosyne glides across a field of background stars in this time-lapse view from NASA's WISE spacecraft. Euphrosyne is quite dark in visible light, but glows brightly at infrared wavelengths. The asteroid Euphrosyne glides across a field of background stars in this time-lapse view from NASA's WISE spacecraft. WISE obtained the images used to create this view over a period of about a day around May 17, 2010, during which it observed the asteroid four times. Because WISE (renamed NEOWISE in 2013) is an infrared telescope, it senses heat from asteroids. Euphrosyne is quite dark in visible light, but glows brightly at infrared wavelengths. This view is a composite of images taken at four different infrared wavelengths: 3.4 microns (color-coded blue), 4.6 microns (cyan), 12 microns (green) and 22 microns (red). The moving asteroid appears as a string of red dots because it is much cooler than the distant background stars. Stars have temperatures in the thousands of degrees, but the asteroid is cooler than room temperature. Thus the stars are represented by shorter wavelength (hotter) blue colors in this view, while the asteroid is shown in longer wavelength (cooler) reddish colors. The WISE spacecraft was put into hibernation in 2011 upon completing its goal of surveying the entire sky in infrared light. WISE cataloged three quarters of a billion objects, including asteroids, stars and galaxies. In August 2013, NASA decided to reinstate the spacecraft on a mission to find and characterize more asteroids. JPL manages NEOWISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace &amp; Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise.
context_page_description: Euphrosyne is a very young asteroid, and the 9th- or 10th-largest in the asteroid belt. It was discovered by James Ferguson on September 1, 1854, the first asteroid found from North America. It is named after Euphrosyne, one of the Charites in Greek mythology. In 2019 a small companion was discovered. It is the third-roundest known asteroid; this is thought to be due to having re-accreted after being disrupted by a collision, and it is not close to hydrostatic equilibrium.
caption: Asteroid Euphrosyne—time-lapse view by WISE (May 17, 2010)
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