The ADONIS AO system installed on the 3.6 m ESO telescope at La Silla (Chile) was used for direct imaging of the main-belt asteroid (216) Kleopatra in near infrared wavelengths. Since the achieved resolution is limited, the observations are consistent with the shape model of Ostro et al. (2000) obtained from radar observations but do not rule out a separated-binary model.
The MISTRAL deconvolution technique shows promise for resolving suspected binary asteroids with adaptive optics systems implemented on larger 8-10 m class telescopes (e.g. VLT, Subaru, Keck, or Gemini). The simulations performed in this work show that this technique would provide accurate restored images of suspected binaries or uncommonly shaped bodies and hence would provide strong evidence regarding their actual nature and valuable data to better understand their origin.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to J.-M. Conan and L. Mugnier (ONERA) for providing us with the MISTRAL and NAOS PSFs simulation packages and to the team at the ESO 3.6 m telescope for their support. Many thanks to Sohrab Ismail-Beigi for correcting the English of this manuscript. F. Marchis's work at ESO-Santiago/La Silla has been supported by an ESO studentship. This work has been partly supported by the National Science Foundation and Technology Center for Adaptive Optics, managed by the University of California at Santa Cruz under cooperative agreement No. AST - 9876783.
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