A spherical harmonics method for asteroid pole determination

Details A spherical harmonics method for asteroid pole determination A spherical harmonics method for asteroid pole determination

Mar 1990

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1990a%26a...229..228l&link_type=abstract

Astronomy and Astrophysics (ISSN 0004-6361), vol. 229, no. 1, March 1990, p. 228-239. Research supported by Lowell Observatory.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

9

Asteroids, Light Curve, Planetary Rotation, Poles, Brightness Distribution, Nasa Space Programs, Power Spectra, Spherical Harmonics, Asteroids, Astronomy, Harmonics, Lightcurve, Techniques, Nysa, Psyche, Kalliope, Laetitia, Eugenia, Dembowska, Procedure

Scientific paper

A new and general method is presented for determining pole orientations of unresolved solar system bodies that exhibit brightness variation with rotation. The accuracy of the method is limited only by the number of available apparitions, which imposes the degree where the Legendre expansion must be truncated. It is shown that power spectra of lightcurves provide enough information to extract pole coordinates from the data, independent of body shape and albedo variegation. The method has been tested using several computer-generated synthetic light-curves, and the accuracy is found to be about 5 deg in both the longitude and latitude of the pole, which is considerably better than that obtained from the standard triaxial ellipsoid model. Finally, the new spherical harmonics method has been applied to six well-observed asteroids: 16 Psyche, 22 Kalliope, 39 Laetitia, 44 Nysa, 45 Eugenia, and 349 Dembowska.

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