Itokawa Color Composite Released

Author: Tom* Comments(1)


Itokawa

JAXA released this color composite of Itokawa. The image is a composite of images taken through red, green and blue filters. The images were taken from about 20 km away by Japan’s Hayabusa spacecraft.

Itokawa rotation It certainly is a irregular shaped body. You can see the rotation of the Itokawa from a series of images JAXA had on their site and I put together in this animation. The orbital period is 12 hours. The rotation sequence was observed on September 10 and 11. The rotation pole points down in these images.

Credit: JAXA

1 Comment so far

  1. curson on September 17th, 2005

    The rotating .gif you made is really nice, and let us see our irregular Itokawa really is. Nice work, and so I wish to the Jaxa probe HAYABUSA.
    bye