Statistics
Scientific paper
Nov 2002
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002esasp.500..509e&link_type=abstract
In: Proceedings of Asteroids, Comets, Meteors - ACM 2002. International Conference, 29 July - 2 August 2002, Berlin, Germany. Ed
Statistics
Asteroid Size Distribution, Space Observations
Scientific paper
New images including the trails of small, main-belt asteroids are continuously being added to the HST Archive. The telescope's small field of view and lack of availability for follow-up observations are more than offset by a unique and remarkable advantage: asteroid trails in HST images are curved due to the parallax induced by the spacecraft's orbital motion during an exposure. Using HST ephemerides to fit a trail's shape, an asteroid's geocentric distance can be directly derived from as little as 10 minutes of imaging data. The availability of accurate distances allows an absolute magnitude (size) distribution to be constructed down to a limiting magnitude of V=24 (H=20; diameter of about 0.3 km) without need of full orbit determinations. Over the past five years, we have searched approximately 160,000 WFPC2 images and discovered the trails of nearly 300 small main-belt and Earth-crossing objects. We present the statistics for the photometric properties of these finds, and the constraints they provide on the main belt size distribution at radii near 1 km.
Evans Robin W.
Stapelfeldt Karl. R.
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