Statistics of 24 Micron Field Asteroids in the Spitzer Space Telescope Taurus Legacy Science Survey

Details Statistics of 24 Micron Field Asteroids in the Spitzer Space Telescope Taurus Legacy Science Survey Statistics of 24 Micron Field Asteroids in the Spitzer Space Telescope Taurus Legacy Science Survey

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.1210h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #12.10; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.751

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We report on field asteroids detected in MIPS 24 micron scan maps from the Taurus legacy science survey. The data were acquired in two observation epochs separated by 3-6 hours, and reach a 5-sigma sensitivity near 1 mJy - sufficient to detect main-belt objects with diameters below 1 km. We find a source density of about 250 asteroids per square degree on the ecliptic plane, with a cumulative brightness distribution which follows a -1.2 power law in flux density. We relate this to the intrinsic asteroid size distribution using a Monte Carlo model of the main belt population and the standard thermal model to predict the observed flux density distribution. An intrinsic size distribution with power-law slope of -2.3 with radius produces an observed brightness distribution that matches the Spitzer results. This result is in good agreement with previous determinations from the Sloan survey for objects in this size range. We further discuss how our analysis can be extended to other large area Spitzer surveys to enable us to characterize the source counts and size distributions over a range of ecliptic latitudes, and to search for radial differences within the main belt.
Support for this work was provided by NASA to the Spitzer GO-1 and GO-3 Taurus survey projects (PIDs 3584 & 30816). The Spitzer Space Telescope is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA.

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