Full list of asteroids that have been optically imaged as of 2013

Question

I know we've obtained some images of asteroids from probes. Since each of those constitutes a fairly costly and public mission, I wonder if it would be possible to get a list of all such objects that have been imaged, as of this year, 2013? Just a text-based list of the IAU names would be fine.

If this would be more than 10 or 20, then I'll gladly withdraw this question. I ask because I don't think that's the case.

Aside from probes equipped with a camera, is there any other source of direct images of asteroids? I know there is radio astronomy as well as other computational methods to approximate the shape from varying intensity over time. The number "imaged" by those methods would be more difficult to pin down, so let's exclude those. But did Hubble image near Earth asteroids?

Answer 1

Emily Lakdawalla has this fantastic montage of images of asteroids and comets from probes. That's all of them, except for Vesta. The numbers are on there.

Hubble can only resolve large asteroids, like Ceres and Vesta. (Actually Ceres is now a "dwarf planet", but she's always an asteroid to me. Cue Billy Joel music.) I presume what you mean by "image" is actually resolve the disk, as opposed to just seeing a point of light.

Answer 2

Here is a list of the images in the Planetary Society image:

• Ceres
• Vesta
• Lutetia
• Mathilde
• Ida
• moon of Ida: Dactyl
• Eros
• Gaspra
• Halley
• Steins
• Annefrank
• Tempel 1
• Wild 2
• Borrelly
• Toutatis
• Hartley 2
• Braille
• Itokawa

This is a total of 18. It's 17 if you don't count Ceres, which might not be classified as an asteroid. Here is a list of the missions that the images came from, their nation, and year of launch.

• Vega 2, Soviet, 1984
• Galileo, NASA, 1989
• NEAR Shoemaker, NASA, 1996
• Deep Space 1, NASA, 1998
• Stardust, NASA, 1999
• Hayabusa, Japan, 2003
• Deep Impact, NASA, 2005
• Rosetta, ESA, 2004
• Dawn, NASA, 2007
• Chang'e 2, China, 2010