Regional variations of optical properties on asteroid (25143) Itokawa taken with the Asteroid Multi-band Imaging Camera (AMICA) on-board the Hayabusa spacecraft

  • Published : 2015.10.15

Abstract

Hayabusa is the JAXA's space mission that succeeded in sample-return from S-type asteroid (25143) Itokawa. During the rendezvous phase, more than a thousand of images were taken with the Asteroid Multi-band Imaging Camera (AMICA). It is valuable to study the regional variation of the optical properties on the asteroid using these images to know the generality and uniqueness of the returned samples. In addition, AMICA images are important in that they provide unique data set at low phase angle (i.e Sun-Itokawa-AMICA's angle) that have not been explored in the previous asteroidal missions. At the previous conference (2015 KAS spring meeting), we introduced our preliminary data analysis of AMICA data without considering the shape model of Itokawa and mentioned. In this study, we present a new result obtained through further analysis, taking account of the shape model of the asteroid. We thus utilized "plate_renderer" tool to derive Hapke model parameters at different terrains. It is found that the opposition amplitude (parameter B0) is consistent with those of the other S-type asteroids while the opposition width (parameter h) is significantly narrower than those of the other S-type asteroids. At this conference, we plan to describe the regional variation of photometric properties on Itokawa.

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