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1620 Geographos and 433 Eros: Shaped by Planetary Tides?

  • Authors: W. F. Bottke, Jr., D. C. Richardson, P. Michel, and S. G. Love

Bottke et al. 1999 The Astronomical Journal 117 1921.

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Fig. 1.

1620 Geographos’s pole‐on shape determined from delay‐Doppler observations taken in the asteroid’s equatorial plane (Ostro et al. 1996). This image has been constructed from multirun sums of 12 coregistered images, each 30° wide in rotation phase space. The central white pixel indicates the body’s center of mass. Rotation direction is indicated by the circular arrow. Brightness indicates the strength of radar return, arbitrarily scaled. Despite substantial smearing of the periphery features, some distinguishing characteristics can be observed: (1) The long axis is tapered on both ends, with one tip narrow and the other more pinched and squat. (2) One side is smooth and convex; the opposite side has a "hump". (3) Cusps at each end are swept back against the rotation direction, giving the body the appearance of a pinwheel when viewed from various aspect angles. The insets show close‐ups from three of the 12 summed coregistered 30° images used to make the composite image; they have resolution of 500 ns × 1.64 Hz (75 × 87 m). The cusps are more prominent here, although considerable smearing remains.

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