PSI SEMINAR SERIES: Thursday, 23 March 2006, 11:00AM
Preliminary results of the multiband imager of the Hayabusa mission
Hideaki "Hirdy" Miyamoto
The Japanese asteroid exploration spacecraft Hayabusa rendezvoused with the near-Earth asteroid, (25143) Itokawa in the summer of 2005. During the observation phase, the onboard camera (AMICA) obtained more than 1,000 images of this tiny asteroid (550m x 298m x 244m), whose surprisingly complex diversities in surface morphologies have been revealed. Hayabusa science team is now actively working on these data, and thus I'll present some initial results of these efforts.