Jack Drummond (Starfire Optical Range, AFRL), Julian Christou (National Science Foundation and Center for Adaptive Optics, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Keywords: Astronomy
Abstract:
In a program to study asteroids with large telescopes, we have recently obtained images of Main-Belt asteroids with adaptive optics (AO) on the Keck-II 10 meter telescope, the world’s largest. Although generally featureless as expected, these images show irregular asteroid outlines, and by following the changing size and orientation we have been able to deduce their full tri-axial ellipsoid dimensions and spin axis direction in less than one night. Even before the first such AO images, Kaasalainen [1, 2] and his colleagues made attempts to deduce the shape of asteroids from their lightcurves. We compare our AO images to these lightcurve inversion (LCI) models, and show the
excellent agreement. Similar techniques can be applied to satellite lightcurves.
Date of Conference: September 16-19, 2008
Track: Astronomy