Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.5921t&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #59.21; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.597
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We are building the Spitzer Asteroid Catalog, a compilation of at least 25,000 independent measurements of asteroids that appear serendipitously in publicly available Spitzer archive data. The data to be mined spans the entire Spitzer photometric capabilities, from 3.6 to 160 microns, but detections will be primarily at 8 and 24 microns due to detector sensitivities and asteroid spectral energy distributions. We consider only asteroids with small positional uncertainties. For each appearance of an asteroid in a Spitzer image, we will measure the thermal flux and derive asteroid size and albedo. Our results will determine the physical properties of a large number of individual asteroids (including identifying thermal lightcurves); help extend the small end of the asteroid size frequency distribution; reveal composition gradients and remove compositional degeneracies; uncover common properties among asteroid families; and serve as a fundamental database of asteroid properties for the coming decades. We have applied our automated pipeline to an initial small dataset in a pilot program and at present are processing our first large infusion of archive data. Here we present results from that initial study and our ongoing analysis, as well as projections and predictions for our complete catalog. The resulting Spitzer Asteroid Catalog will be submitted both to scientific journals and to NASA's Planetary Data System.
This work is based on archival data obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA. Support for this work was provided by an award issued by NASA/JPL/Caltech.
Bhattacharya Bhubanjyoti
Blaylock Myra
Stansberry John Arthur
Sykes Mark V.
Trilling David Eric
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