Elizabeth Tasker
The presentation will be in Japanese, but there's a JAXA press conference at 16:00 JST (~30 minutes) on the flyby of Torifune by Hayabusa2.
SHOW US A SPACE ROCK! And let's hug a 12 year old spacecraft that just pulled off a tight flyby it was never designed to do. Maybe we can save the world 🛰️👀🪨.
Michael Busch
For my PhD defense; I arranged a selection of pastries for the committee and audience.
This followed the "pastry theory of asteroid shapes", which Steve Ostro once described over the cafeteria dessert counter.
Michael Busch
Comparisons of asteroid shapes to food:
Potato, sweet potato - lumpy ellipsoids.
Meatball, takoyaki - lumpy spheroid.
Muffin, cupcake - equatorial ridge on spheroid.
Peanut, ginger root, sticky rolls, drumstick - contact binaries
Scone - some of the more angular ones
Elizabeth Tasker
@michael_w_busch @tanavit This is what you get for providing snacks at conferences 🤨
Elizabeth Tasker
Assuming I am understanding Yoshikawa Makoto correctly, I think the model in his hand was our best guess of the shape of Torifune based on light curve data from Earth. It demonstrates how much information even a rapid flyby can provide on the nature of an asteroid.
tanavit
In France, we call that shape a "patatoïde", from "patate", colloquial for "potatoe".
Looks like Torifune is a "peanutoïd".
😜
Elizabeth Tasker
HELL YEAH! Torifune is another Itokawa; a contact binary where two asteroids collided gently enough to merge. In the case of Itokawa, the two parts were likely fragments of the same parent asteroid that fragmented during a catastrophic collision, and then gentle bounced back together.
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