Physical Characterization of Asteroids Candidates of Marco Polo Mission

Details Physical Characterization of Asteroids Candidates of Marco Polo Mission Physical Characterization of Asteroids Candidates of Marco Polo Mission

Sep 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009dps....41.3408b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #41, #34.08

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Scientific paper

The principal scientific objective of the Marco Polo mission is to return unaltered NEO materials. Marco Polo will allow us to analyze the samples in terrestrial laboratories, thereby obtaining measurements that cannot yet beperformed from a robotic spacecraft. The selection of the target asteroids for the mission has important consequences in terms of mission design, constraints, and operational requirements. A list of asteroids as possible targets for the Marco Polo mission has been drawn, taken into account both dynamical and physical constraints. The key parameters of this list were the accessibility of the object (the delta-V amount for the encounter with the target) and the desirable, primitive composition requirements of the target deduced from the groundbased data (mainly from colors and spectroscopy).
While the accessibility is dealing with space technological achievements, the primitive composition of the target is oriented toward the research on asteroids belonging to D-, T-, or C-type classes. For some of the possible targets, the physical data are sparse and reveals only partial knowledge of these objects while for some of them no spectroscopic investigations are yet available in the IR spectral region.
To improve the situation, observations of asteroids 1917, 8567, 16960, 156452, 163000, 164400, and 2001 SG286 were obtained using SpeX/IRTF in the 0.8-2.5µm spectral region. The analysis of their NIR spectra reveals that many of these objects belong to the S-type complex (DeMeo, Icarus 202, 2009). The exception is the asteroid 2001 SG286, for which the spectrum is flat, similar to C-complex. The analysis of slopes, band strengths, and the most probable mineralogical and meteorite analog models will be presented.

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