🇫🇷🛰️ #Toutatis : le nouvel outil de défense français pour l’orbite basse
La France renforce sa défense spatiale avec le lancement de deux nanosatellites produits par @USpace_, une startup toulousaine, dans le cadre du programme #Toutatis.

Supervisé par la @Dga, ce projet vise à protéger les intérêts français en orbite basse.

Le satellite « Splinter » est conçu pour des manœuvres autonomes, tandis que « Lisa1 » se spécialise dans la surveillance de l’espace. En collaboration avec

Re. last repost of @PhilStooke :

Related to its complicated shape; #Toutatis has a spin state that changes significantly due to gravitational tides from Earth, Sun, Moon, and even Jupiter.

This kept me busy for a while working with Yu Takahashi & Dan Scheeres to figure out how to match all the radar images from 1992 through 2012:

Takahashi, Busch, & Scheeres 2013, AJ 146, 95: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-6256/146/4/95/pdf

#TeamRadar

(Fans of "For All Mankind" may have seen this paper when it was used as a prop.)

via James Tuttle Keane on Twitter ( https://twitter.com/jtuttlekeane/status/1731140919624450212 ):

I learn that the result of my summer working at CU Boulder with Yu Takahashi and Dan Scheeres was used as a prop on #ForAllMankind when the writers wanted a page of angular coordinates:

Takahashi, Busch, & Scheeres 2013, "Spin State and Moment of Inertia Characterization of 4179 Toutatis" - https://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/takahashi.etal.toutatis.2013.pdf.

Figure based on the #Toutatis shape model of Hudson et al. 2003.

That is not where I expected to see that figure.