Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-ws8qp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T15:03:31.962Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Thermophysical Characteristics of OSIRIS-REx Target Asteroid (101955) Bennu

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2016

Liangliang Yu
Affiliation:
Key Laboratory of Planetary Sciences, Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing 210008, China Lunar and Planetary Science Laboratory, Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macau email: jijh@pmo.ac.cn, yullmoon@pmo.ac.cn
Jianghui Ji
Affiliation:
Key Laboratory of Planetary Sciences, Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing 210008, China
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

In this work, we investigate the thermophysical properties, including thermal inertia, roughness fraction and surface grain size of OSIRIS-REx target asteroid (101955) Bennu by using a thermophysical model with the recently updated 3D radar-derived shape model (Nolan et al., 2013) and mid-infrared observations (Müller et al. 2012, Emery et al., 2014). We find that the asteroid bears an effective diameter of 510+6−40 m, a geometric albedo of 0.047+0.0083−0.0011, a roughness fraction of 0.04+0.26−0.04, and thermal inertia of 240+440−60 Jm−2s−0.5K−1 for our best-fit solution. The best-estimate thermal inertia suggests that fine-grained regolith may cover a large portion of Bennu's surface, where a grain size may vary from 1.3 to 31 mm. Our outcome suggests that Bennu is suitable for the OSIRIS-REx mission to return samples to Earth.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2016 

References

Bevington, P. R. & Robinson, D. K. 2003, third ed, Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences (McGraw-Hill, New York), pp. 194217Google Scholar
Chesley, S. R., Farnocchia, D., Nolan, M. C., et al. 2014, Icarus, 235, 522Google Scholar
Emery, J. P., Fernández, Y. R., Kelley, M. S. P., et al. 2014, Icarus, 234, 1735CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gundlach, B. & Blum, J. 2013, Icarus, 223, 479492Google Scholar
Lauretta, D. S., and the OSIRIS-REx Team 2012, LPS XXXXIII, Abstract 2491Google Scholar
Milani, A., Chesley, S. R., Sansaturio, M. E., et al. 2009, Icarus, 203 (2), 460471CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, T. G., O'Rourke, L., Barucci, A. M., et al. 2012, A&A, 548, A36Google Scholar
Nolan, M. C., Magri, C., Howell, E. S., et al. 2013, Icarus, 226, 629640Google Scholar
Rozitis, B. & Green, S. F. 2011, MNRAS, 415, 2042Google Scholar
Yu, L. L., Ji, J. H., & Wang, S. 2014, MNRAS, 439, 3357Google Scholar
Yu, L. L. & Ji, J. H. 2015, MNRAS, 452, 368CrossRefGoogle Scholar