HR: 0800h
AN: P41A-0222    [Abstracts]
TI: Shape, Topography and Roughness of 25143 Itokawa
AU: * Cheng, A F
EM: andrew.cheng@jhuapl.edu
AF: JHUAPL, Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 29723-6099, United States
AU: * Cheng, A F
EM: andrew.cheng@jhuapl.edu
AF: Office of the Chief Scientist, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquaters, Washington, DC 20546, United States
AU: Barnouin-Jha, O S
EM: olivier.barnouin-jha@jhuapl.edu
AF: JHUAPL, Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 29723-6099, United States
AB: The recent visit of the Hayabusa spacecraft to the small near-Earth asteroid (NEA) 25143 Itokawa yielded the surprising discovery that Itokawa was not an intact object but a low density, gravitationally accumulated, rubble pile. This contrasts with the finding, from the only other NEA visited by an asteroid lander, that 433 Eros was an intact object and not a rubble pile. Eros was visited by the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft which landed in 2001. Accurately co-registered, high resolution imager and lidar data from NEAR Shoemaker have demonstrated the fractal properties of small scale surface topography on Eros, where boulders tend to be found on the tops of long ridges, consistent with the presence of an underlying globally coherent structure. However, Itokawa is a rubble pile with a fundamentally different collisional history. Here we analyze co-registered, high resolution lidar and imager data from Itokawa, obtained by Hayabusa, to explore fractal properties and surface roughness distributions on Itokawa for comparison with the results from Eros.
DE: 6000 PLANETARY SCIENCES: COMETS AND SMALL BODIES
DE: 6022 Impact phenomena (5420, 8136)
DE: 6055 Surfaces
DE: 6205 Asteroids
SC: Planetary Sciences [P]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting