Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
8138978 Icarus 2014 15 Pages PDF
Abstract
On 2012 December, 13, 08:30 (UTC), Chang'E-2 flew by Asteroid 4179 Toutatis in deep space 7 million kilometers away from Earth. The flyby mission returned clear optical images of Toutatis for the first time. The flyby distance and image pixel scale were calculated from the image size of the asteroid compared to a predicted view of an earlier radar shape model. We compared the similarities and differences in both the radar model and the CE-2 photo mosaic, and measured the craters and lumps on the surface of Toutatis. We preliminarily analyzed the topography of the Toutatis surface. We found that the density of craters on the small lobe is less than that on the big lobe.
Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Earth and Planetary Sciences Space and Planetary Science
Authors
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