Most asteroids are somewhat elongated and have non-zero lightcurve amplitudes. Such asteroids can be detected in large-scale sky surveys even if their mean magnitudes are fainter than the stated sensitivity limits. We explore the detection of elongated asteroids under a set of idealized but useful approximations. We find that objects up to 1 magnitude fainter than a survey's sensitivity limit are likely to be detected, and that the effect is most pronounced for asteroids with lightcurve amplitudes 0.1-0.4 mag.This imposes a bias on the derived size and shape distributions of the population that must be properly accounted for.
@article{arxiv.2105.09921,
title = {Asteroid lightcurves and detection, shape, and size biases in large-scale surveys},
author = {Samuel Navarro-Meza and Erin Aadland and David Trilling},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.09921},
year = {2021}
}