Related papers: Characterizing Asteroids Multiply-Observed at Infr…
The lightcurves of asteroids are essential for determining their physical characteristics, including shape, spin, size, and surface composition. However, most asteroids are missing some of these basic physical parameters due to lack of…
The Planck mission, originally devised for cosmological studies, offers the opportunity to observe Solar System objects at millimetric and submillimetric wavelengths. We concentrate in this paper on the asteroids of the Main Belt. We intend…
The available set of spin and shape modelled asteroids is strongly biased against slowly rotating targets and those with low lightcurve amplitudes. As a consequence of these selection effects, the current picture of asteroid spin axis…
The Near Earth Object Surveyor mission has a requirement to find two-thirds of the potentially hazardous asteroids larger than 140 meters in size. In order to determine the mission's expected progress toward this goal during design and…
Asteroid modeling efforts in the last decade resulted in a comprehensive dataset of almost 400 convex shape models and their rotation states. This amount already provided a deep insight into physical properties of main-belt asteroids or…
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) observed 52 Centaurs and Scattered Disk Objects in the thermal infrared, including the 15 discoveries that were new. We present analyses of these observations to estimate sizes and mean optical…
Given the compositional diversity of asteroids, and their distribution in space, it is impossible to consider returning samples from each one to establish their origin. However, the velocity and molecular composition of primary minerals,…
We present thermal properties and an improved shape model for potentially hazardous asteroid (162421) 2000 ET70. In addition to the radar data from 2000 ET70's apparition in 2012, our model incorporates optical lightcurves and infrared…
In addition to collisions and gravitational forces, it is now becoming widely acknowledged that photon recoil forces and torques from the asymmetric reflection and thermal re-radiation of sunlight are primary mechanisms that govern the…
The classification of the minor bodies of the Solar System based on observables has been continuously developed and iterated over the past 40 years. While prior iterations followed either the availability of large observational campaigns or…
We present an analysis of the accuracy of geometric albedos determined for asteroids through the modeling of observed thermal infrared radiation. We show that albedo uncertainty is dominated by the uncertainty on the measured $H_V$ absolute…
Possible connections between the physical properties of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) and their orbital evolution were explored, with emphasis on binary asteroids. Our main starting hypothesis, suggested from the observations, was that the NEA…
Asteroid pairs had a single progenitor that split due to rotational-fission of a weak, rubble-pile structured body. By constructing shape models of asteroid pairs from multiple-apparition observations and using a lightcurve inversion…
We report measured spectral properties for more than 1000 NEOs, representing>5% of the currently discovered population. Thermal flux detected below 2.5 {\mu}m allows us to make albedo estimates for nearly 50 objects, including two comets.…
Recent discoveries show that asteroids spinning in less than a few minutes undergo sizeable semi-major-axis drifts, possibly driven by the Yarkovsky effect. Analytical formulas can match these drifts only if very low thermal inertia is…
Mid-infrared (mid-IR) observations of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) have historically been a valuable tool for understanding their physical properties. However, the current state of mid-IR instruments on ground-based telescopes places several…
While of order a million asteroids have been discovered, the number in rigorously controlled samples that have precise orbits and rotation periods, as well as well-measured colors, is relatively small. In particular, less than a dozen…
(349) Dembowska, a large, bright main-belt asteroid, has a fast rotation and oblique spin axis. It may have experienced partial melting and differentiation. We constrain Dembowska's thermophysical properties, e.g., thermal inertia,…
Thermal infrared emission and thermophysical modeling techniques are powerful tools in deciphering the surface properties of asteroids. The near-Earth asteroid (3200) Phaethon is an active asteroid with a very small perihelion distance and…
This article describes a citizen-science project conducted by the Spanish Virtual Observatory (SVO) to improve the orbits of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) using data from astronomical archives. The list of NEAs maintained at the Minor Planet…