Abstract
Hayabusa, the Japanese asteroid sample returning mission, acquired more than 1400 scientific images of its target asteroid (25143) Itokawa using the Asteroid Multi-band Imaging Camera (AMICA). It took images at a wide coverage of the phase angle a (Sun-Itokawa-Hayabusa) from $a{\sim}0^{\circ}$ to ${\sim}35^{\circ}$, providing a unique opportunity for studying the opposition effect (a sharp surge in brightness of asteroidal surface). Here we present a study of the opposition effect on Itokawa using the AMICA multi-band data. We found that (1) the opposition strength near the opposition is independent of the incident/emission angles of the light, also (2) it weakly depends on the wavelength showing the strongest surge around 0.7 um, and (3) the reflectance increases linearly at a>$1.5^{\circ}$ while nonlinearly at a<$1.5^{\circ}$ as approaching the opposition point. In particular, we noticed that the increasing rate has a correlation with the reflectance in the nonlinear domain whereas no detectable correlation with the reflectance in the linear domain. From these results, we conjecture that the coherent backscattering opposition effect is a dominant mechanism for the nonlinear opposition surge at a<$1.5^{\circ}$ while shadow hiding opposition effect is responsible for the linear opposition surge at a>$1.5^{\circ}$.