Steven J. Ostro: Pioneer in Asteroid Lightcurve Inversion

Details Steven J. Ostro: Pioneer in Asteroid Lightcurve Inversion Steven J. Ostro: Pioneer in Asteroid Lightcurve Inversion

Sep 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009dps....41.2901h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #41, #29.01

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

In 1906, Henry Norris Russell wrote a landmark paper (Astrophys. J. 24, 1-18, 1906) that set the field of lightcurve inversion back by more than three quarters of a century, until Steve Ostro and Robert Connolly published a paper on "convex profile inversion” (Icarus 57, 443-463, 1984). Russell's stifling contribution was innocent enough, and entirely correct: he showed that with "two cans of paint", one can decorate any arbitrarily shaped body in an infinite number of ways to yield any particular lightcurve, even, for example, a cigar shape that is brightest viewed end-on. This sufficed to discourage serious mathematical attack on the problem until Ostro & Connolly's landmark paper of 1984. They showed that if you have only "one can of paint", that is, in the absence of albedo variegation, the problem is tractable and one can make remarkable progress in lightcurve inversion to obtain shapes, or at least the "convex profile” of the real shape. As we now know, nature appears to have only one can of paint (per asteroid), that is, asteroids seem to paint themselves grey so that the uniform reflectivity assumption is quite excellent. Both radar and optical lightcurve inversion techniques are now quite mature, thanks to Steve's pioneering insights.

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