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The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) reactivation mission has completed its third year of surveying the sky in the thermal infrared for near-Earth asteroids and comets. NEOWISE collects simultaneous…
The Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) 2024 PT5 is on an Earth-like orbit which remained in Earth's immediate vicinity for several months at the end of 2024. PT5's orbit is challenging to populate with asteroids originating from the Main Belt and is…
We are conducting a survey using twilight time on the Dark Energy Camera with the Blanco 4m telescope in Chile to look for objects interior to Earth's and Venus' orbits. To date we have discovered two rare Atira/Apohele asteroids, 2021 LJ4…
Thermal infrared observations are the most effective way to measure asteroid diameter and albedo for a large number of near-Earth objects. Major surveys like NEOWISE, NEOSurvey, ExploreNEOs, and NEOLegacy find a small fraction of high…
We present results of polarimetric, photometric, and spectral observations of the near-Earth asteroid (3200) Phaethon carried out at the 6-m BTA telescope of the Special Astrophysical Observatory and the 2.6-m and 1.25-m telescopes of the…
We seek evidence of the Yarkovsky effect among Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) by measuring the Yarkovsky-related orbital drift from the orbital fit. To prevent the occurrence of unreliable detections we employ a high precision dynamical model,…
Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) that may evolve into impactors deserve detailed threat assessment studies. Early physical characterization of a would-be impactor may help in optimizing impact mitigation plans. We first detected NEA…
A recent occultation measurement of the dwarf planet Haumea (Ortiz et al. 2017) revealed an elongated shape with the longest axis comparable to Pluto's mean diameter. The chords also indicate a ring around Haumea's equatorial plane, where…
We propose to use a modest fraction of the re-purposed Kepler mission time and apertures to greatly increase the quantity and quality of our knowledge of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) rotation and shape. NEAs are important for understanding…
Asteroids of size larger than 150 m generally do not have rotation periods smaller than 2.2 hours. This spin cutoff is believed to be due to the gravitationally bound rubble-pile structures of the asteroids. Rotation with periods exceeding…
The asteroid 2014 JO25, considered to be "potentially hazardous" by the Minor Planet Center, was spectroscopically followed during its close-Earth encounter on 19th and 20th of April 2017. The spectra of the asteroid were taken with the low…
We present here VRI spectrophotometry of 39 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) observed with the Sutherland, South Africa, node of the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet). Of the 39 NEAs, 19 were targeted, but because of KMTNet's large 2…
Results from the TESS mission showed that previous studies strngly underestimated the number of slow rotators, revealing the importance of studying those asteroids. For most slowly rotating asteroids (P > 12), no spin and shape model is…
We report the discovery and orbit of a new dwarf planet candidate, 2015 RR$_{245}$, by the Outer Solar System Origins Survey (OSSOS). 2015 RR$_{245}$'s orbit is eccentric ($e=0.586$), with a semi-major axis near 82 au, yielding a perihelion…
V455 Aur is a detached eclipsing binary containing two F-stars in a 3.15-d orbit with a small eccentricity. Its eclipses were discovered in data from the Hipparcos satellite and a spectroscopic orbit was obtained by Griffin (2001, 2013).…
A cratered asteroid acts somewhat like a retroflector, sending light and infrared radiation back toward the Sun, while thermal inertia in a rotating asteroid causes the infrared radiation to peak over the ``afternoon'' part. In this paper a…
We conducted photometric and spectroscopic characterization of near-Earth asteroid (52768) 1998 OR2 during a close approach to the Earth in April of 2020. Our photometric measurements confirm the rotation period of the asteroid to be 4.126…
On 15 February 2013, the asteroid 367943 Duende (2012 DA14) experienced a near-Earth encounter at an altitude of 27,700 km or 4.2 Earth radii. We present here the results of an extensive, multi-observatory campaign designed to probe for…
The near-Earth asteroid 3200 Phaethon (1983 TB) is an attractive object not only from a scientific viewpoint but also because of JAXA's DESTINY+ target. The rotational lightcurve and spin properties were investigated based on the data…
Rectified diameters and albedo estimates of 1517 main belt asteroid selected from the IRAS and MSX asteroid photometry catalogues are derived from updated infrared thermal models, the Standard Thermal Model (STM) and the Near Earth Asteroid…