NEAR MSI Images of Asteroid Eros: New Data Products and Analysis
Abstract
The Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft orbited asteroid Eros for approximately one year in 2000-2001, returning thousands of images obtained with the MultiSpectral Imager (MSI) camera system. R. Gaskell used ~20,000 of these images to construct a high-resolution shape model of Eros that was archived in the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS) in 2008. We have produced backplanes for this set of images, and are in the process of preparing them for delivery to the PDS. The 16 backplanes contain information of interest for each pixel in an image: 1. Image pixel value. 2. x value of point, body centered coords. 3. y value of point. 4. z value of point. 5. Latitude. 6. Longitude. 7. Distance from center of asteroid. 8. Solar incidence angle. 9. Emergence angle. 10. Phase angle. 11. Horizontal pixel scale (km/pixel). 12. Vertical pixel scale. 13. Slope. 14. Elevation. 15. Gravitational acceleration. 16. Gravitational potential. This set of backplanes will be provided to the PDS Small Bodies Node, with PDS-4 labels. The Gaskell shape model, produced with stereophotoclinometry, has more than 3.1 million plates. Hence this model has more than an order of magnitude better spatial resolution compared with the older shape model (200,700 plates). The high-resolution shape model permits substantial improvements in photometric normalization of images to be made, because the incidence, emergence, and phase angles can be determined at smaller scales. We plan to perform new photometric normalization of color image sets in order to search for mineralogical variations at higher resolution than was previously possible. In addition, we will carry out phase-ratio analysis to extract information on surface texture and scattering behavior for features of special interest.
- Publication:
-
AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts #48
- Pub Date:
- October 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016DPS....4832511B