Surveying near-Earth asteroids in the thermal infrared

Details Surveying near-Earth asteroids in the thermal infrared Surveying near-Earth asteroids in the thermal infrared

Nov 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002esasp.500..891d&link_type=abstract

In: Proceedings of Asteroids, Comets, Meteors - ACM 2002. International Conference, 29 July - 2 August 2002, Berlin, Germany. Ed

Physics

Near-Earth Asteroids: Infrared Observations

Scientific paper

Gathering information on the physical characteristics of the near-Earth asteroid (NEA) population is important for a number of scientific and technical reasons, including accurate assessment of the impact hazard and considerations of mitigation techniques. Observations in the thermal infrared enable albedos and diameters to be derived and can give some insight into the thermal properties of an object. Albedos are particularly important for resolving ambiguities in the determination of taxonomic types from reflection spectra. Even though about 1800 NEAs have been discovered to date, our knowledge of their sizes and albedos is limited to very few objects, resulting in a large uncertainty on the distribution of these parameters for the whole population. We present a summary of results to date from an ongoing extensive program of thermal-IR observations of near-Earth asteroids using the Keck 1, Mauna Kea, Hawaii and ESO 3.6-m (La Silla, Chile) telescopes. Albedos and diameters are derived by model fitting to spectrophotometry in the 5-20 μm range and data from optical observations. These obervations are providing information on much smaller (and younger) asteroids than those observed in the main belt and suggest that the albedo distribution of the NEA population may be quite different to that of the observed main-belt population. Relevant aspects of the thermal modelling and the question of the unexpectedly high albedo values obtained in several cases are discussed.

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