That historical page pointed out that whether people thought of the asteroids as planets or "minor planets" may have affected their assumptions about the objects' sizes. It's probably affected allocation of resources for research as well: if Ceres is thought of as just an asteroid, then you'd want to send probes to the most convenient asteroids rather than to Ceres specifically. And that's pretty much what's happened: the first asteroids to be imaged close up were flybys of convenience by probes that were going somewhere else (the first was Gaspra, which the Galileo spacecraft saw in 1991), and others were near-Earth bodies.
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Date: 2006-08-22 04:48 am (UTC)That historical page pointed out that whether people thought of the asteroids as planets or "minor planets" may have affected their assumptions about the objects' sizes. It's probably affected allocation of resources for research as well: if Ceres is thought of as just an asteroid, then you'd want to send probes to the most convenient asteroids rather than to Ceres specifically. And that's pretty much what's happened: the first asteroids to be imaged close up were flybys of convenience by probes that were going somewhere else (the first was Gaspra, which the Galileo spacecraft saw in 1991), and others were near-Earth bodies.