Emily
Editor, Senior Moderator
http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/Toutatis2012/Toutatis2012_planning.html
Background
4179 Toutatis was discovered by C. Pollas at Caussols (France) in January of 1989. Toutatis has been making close approaches to Earth at four-year intervals since its discovery, and as a result, it was studied extensively with radar in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, and 2008, and also at a variety of optical and infrared wavelengths in 1992-1993. Toutatis is an irregular and very
elongated object. It's also a very slow, non-principal axis rotator haracterized by 5.4-day rotation about the long axis and 7.3-day precession of the long axis about the angular momentum vector. A summary of earlier observations of Toutatis is available online
at: http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/4179_Toutatis/toutatis.html
Toutatis will approach within 0.0463 AU of Earth (18 lunar distances) on December 12, 2012 when it will be a very strong radar target at Goldstone and Arecibo. We are planning an extensive campaign of radar observations at both telescopes between December 4 - 22. We are also planning
radar speckle tracking observations using the antennas in the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) as receivers. The radar speckle observations should provide particularly tight constraints on the spin vector and help improve the shape model.
