Photometric Survey of Binary Near-Earth Asteroids

Details Photometric Survey of Binary Near-Earth Asteroids Photometric Survey of Binary Near-Earth Asteroids

Nov 2004

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2004dps....36.2804p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #36, #28.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 36, p.1131

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

2

Scientific paper

We revisited and re-analysed photometric data obtained for 16 binary near-Earth asteroids (14 of them are certain detections, either from photometry or from radar, two are serious suspects). We present an overview of general properties of the binary NEA population. Satellite sizes of all but one of the systems are in the range 0.2 to 0.5 primary's diameter, with the upper limit appearing significant. Primary diameters span most of the size range of rubble-pile near-Earth asteroids, i.e., from 0.2 km up to a few km. All but one system are asynchronous systems, with the primary rotating much faster than the mutual orbital period - most of the reliably estimated primary rotation periods are confined to the narrow range 2.2--2.8 h; the two outliers have primary periods of 3.594 h and 13.89 h. Orbital periods distribution shows a significant lower limit of ˜ 12 h while there is no obvious upper limit. Secondary rotations appear mostly (but not generally) synchronized with the mutual orbital motions. While primaries show lightcurves with low amplitudes indicating that they have roughly spheroidal shapes with low equatorial elongations, secondary lightcurves suggest that some of them have more elongated shapes. We will investigate observational selection effects and biases present in the observed sample in order to debias the observed parameters distributions. The distributions will be discussed and compared with theoretical predictions. An updated estimate of the fraction of binary systems among near-Earth asteroids will also be derived.
The work at Ondrejov was supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Grant A3003204.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Photometric Survey of Binary Near-Earth Asteroids does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Photometric Survey of Binary Near-Earth Asteroids, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Photometric Survey of Binary Near-Earth Asteroids will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1013830