Ginger-Shaped Asteroid Glides By China’s Lunar Probe Chang’e-2

A close flyby by Chang’e-2 of the near-Earth asteroid 4179 Toutatis reveals new insights into the geological features and formation of the ginger-root-shaped asteroid.

AsianScientist (Dec. 13, 2013) – A close flyby by the Chinese lunar probe Chang’e-2 of the near-Earth asteroid 4179 Toutatis reveals new insights into the geological features and formation of the ginger-root-shaped asteroid.

In December 2012, Chang’e-2 completed a flyby of 4179 Toutatis at distances as close as 770 meters. The high-resolution images provide a number of new discoveries about the asteroid, reports the Chang’e-2 mission team of China’s Lunar Exploration Program.

Toutatis has an irregular, faceted surface and its shape resembles a ginger root with a smaller ‘head’ lobe and a larger ‘body’ lobe connected at a perpendicular angle by a neck region. The authors identify an 800-meter basin at the end of the large lobe, which could be the result of a large impact, as well as more than 50 craters on the asteroid’s surface.

The findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, indicate that Toutatis is probably a rubble-pile asteroid, which could reassemble itself into a weak aggregate of large fragments through a heavy impact or many smaller impacts.

The two-lobed configuration and the different orientations of the asteroid’s head and body hint that Toutatis could have formed from two separate objects that merged as a contact binary, although the exact events in the formation of the asteroid remain uncertain.

The article can be found at: Huang J et al. (2013) The Ginger-shaped Asteroid 4179 Toutatis: New Observations from a Successful Flyby of Chang’e-2.

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Source: Scientific Reports.
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