2026 July 14 - Double Lobed Asteroid Torifune

[00:00:02]Greetings and welcome to the Astronomy Picture of the Day podcast.

[00:00:07]Today's picture is titled double-lobed asteroid Toutatis So, what do we see here?

[00:00:15]Well, here we see the asteroid known as 98943 Toutatis and this was imaged by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa 2.

[00:00:30]Now, visiting this asteroid was not the main part of its mission. Its mission was to go and get a sample from another asteroid known as Ryugu and once that mission was finished, the spacecraft wasn't done. It was able to visit other objects and this one occurred just a couple of weeks ago when it flew by Toutatis and we get to see that it is another double-lobed asteroid. Now, we've seen this on a lot of other objects and it seems to be something very common that occurs in our solar system.

[00:01:07]It's likely the result of perhaps a slow collision. Obviously, a very fast collision would crunch things together, but when objects are moving close together at roughly the same speed, they may slowly compact together and stick as one solid object. So, over millions and billions of years, they can slowly crush into one another, hold together, and give us this double-lobed feature that we see within a lot of objects. And again, we've seen this in other asteroids, we've seen it in objects like Arrokoth out in the Kuiper Belt. So, we do see this type of thing over and over again.

[00:01:49]Now, this isn't the end of the mission for Hayabusa 2.

[00:01:54]It continues as its journey through the asteroid belt and will pass by another asteroid in 2031.

[00:02:02]This one known as 1998 KY26.

[00:02:08]And we'll get a look at that asteroid in about 5 years from now when it travels travels there and happens to pass by this other asteroid. So we are starting to learn a little bit more about asteroids. We've known about them since the very early 1800s when the first asteroid was discovered. But until recently, until the last few decades, all we knew them as were points of light in the sky. We could map out their paths. We could use a spectrum to be able to determine something about their compositions.

[00:02:42]But to really see them was not something we could do until we had spacecraft going there to actually look at the asteroids.

[00:02:51]You can't see it like this from Earth.

[00:02:53]These are way too small. This one only several soccer fields in length and would be completely invisible to us on Earth except as a single point of light.

[00:03:06]But as we start to observe more and more asteroids, we start to get better idea.

[00:03:11]We can get some more statistical properties of what these asteroids are like and how they look. One interesting property of this one is that we notice there are no craters.

[00:03:22]Completely craterless. Now generally we say craters is a sign of activity on the surface. Well, this object is much too small to really have any kind of geological activity going on. However, it is really just a big pile of rubble.

[00:03:38]It's not a solid object in the way we normally think of that when we talk about our own moon. It is just a big rubble pile and therefore object crashing into it wouldn't leave behind much of a crater.

[00:03:53]So, we can really start to learn more and more about these as we start to look at more asteroids and study them.

[00:04:02]So, that was our picture of the day titled double-lobed asteroid Torrefuna.

[00:04:09]We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture.

[00:04:12]So, until then, have a great day, everyone, and I will see you in class.