Asteroids - Toutatis

PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION PASADENA, CALIF. PHOTO CAPTION TOP P-41525 These are radar images of asteroid 4179 Toutatis made during the object's recent close approach to Earth. The images reveal two irregularly shaped, cratered objects about 4 and 2.5 kilometers in average diameter which are probably in contact with each other. The four frames shown here were obtained on Dec. 8, 9, 10 and 13, 1992 when Toutatis was an average of about 4 million kilometers from Earth. The time required to obtain each of these images was 55, 14, 37 and 85 min. respectively. On each day, the asteroid was in a different orientation with respect to Earth. In these images, the radar illumination comes from the top of the page, so parts of each component facing toward the bottom are not seen. The large crater shown in the Dec. 9 image (second from the top) is about 700 meters in diameter. The radar observations were carried out at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California's Mojave desert by a team led by Dr. Steven Ostro of JPL. for most of the work, a 400,000 watt coded radio transmission was beamed at Toutatis from the Goldstone main 70-meter antenna. The echoes, which took as little as 24 seconds to travel to Toutatis and back, were received by the new 34-meter antenna and relayed back to the 70-meter station where they were decoded and processed into images.

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