Abashiri, Hokkaido
Abashiri (網走市, Abashiri-shi) is a city located in Okhotsk Subprefecture, Hokkaido, Japan.
Abashiri is known as the site of the Abashiri Prison, a Meiji-era facility used for the incarceration of political prisoners. The old prison has been turned into a museum, but the city's new maximum-security prison is still in use.
As of 2008, the city has an estimated population of 40,333 and a density of 85.6 persons per km² (222 persons per sq. mi.). The total area is 470.94 km2 (181.83 sq mi).
History
4263 Abashiri
4263 Abashiri, provisional designation 1989 RL2, is a stony asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, about 8 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 7 September 1989, by Japanese astronomers Masayuki Yanai and Kazuro Watanabe at Kitami Observatory in eastern Hokkaidō, Japan.
The S-type asteroid is a member of the Flora family, one of the largest groups of stony asteroids in the main-belt. It orbits the Sun at a distance of 1.9–2.5 AU once every 3 years and 4 months (1,220 days). Its orbit shows an eccentricity of 0.14 and an inclination of 6 degrees from the plane of the ecliptic.
In 2008 and 2011, two photometric light-curve analysis by Czech astronomer Petr Pravec have rendered a well-defined rotation period of 7000488199999999999♠4.8820±0.0002 and 7000488170000000000♠4.8817±0.0001 hours with a corresponding brightness amplitude of 0.15 and 0.11 in magnitude, respectively. According to the survey carried out by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer with its subsequent NEOWISE mission, the asteroid's surface has an albedo of 0.20, while the Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link (CALL) assumes a value of 0.24, which is identical to the albedo of the Flora family's namesake, the asteroid 8 Flora.
Podcasts:
