Derivation of 1.064 μm normal albedos on the C-type asteroid Ryugu from laser pulse intensity measurement of the Hayabusa2 LIDAROPEN ACCESS
Ryuhei Yamada, Keiko Yamamoto, Shoko Oshigami, Hiroshi Araki, Hiroki Senshu, Hirotomo Noda, Noriyuki Namiki, Koji Matsumoto, Fumi Yoshida, Shinsuke Abe, Naru Hirata, Sho Sasaki & Takahide Mizuno
Earth, Planets and Space volume 74, Article number: 166
Published: 08 November 2022
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“Japanese asteroid explorer Hayabusa2 arrived at C-type asteroid 162,173 Ryugu in June 2018. The laser altimeter (LIDAR) onboard Hayabusa2 measured its own transmitted laser and returned pulse intensities from a Ryugu surface until November 2019. Because the Ryugu surface is extremely rough, topography dominates over the material properties in the conventional derivation of normal albedo. Thus, we developed a method to retrieve the normal albedo from the rough surface of a C-type asteroid at a LIDAR laser wavelength of 1.064 μm. The albedo map covering an equatorial band between – 40° and + 20° in latitude was created with 3˚-by-3˚ resolution using the intensity data obtained before the conjunction of the spacecraft with the Sun. The average of the normal albedo is 0.0405 ± 0.0027, whereas approximately half of the 3°-by-3° grids are between 0.04 and 0.045. The low and uniform normal albedo feature is common to other remote-sensing observations of Ryugu by visible and near-infrared cameras onboard Hayabusa2.”
