Bibcode
Campins, Humberto; Kelley, Michael S.; Fernández, Yanga; Licandro, Javier; Hargrove, Kelsey
Bibliographical reference
Earth, Moon, and Planets, Volume 105, Issue 2-4, pp. 159-165
Advertised on:
9
2009
Citations
17
Refereed citations
16
Description
We present initial results from a study of a sample of low-perihelion
near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) using the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) on
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The 7-14 μm thermal emission
spectra have been fitted with models of the thermal continuum to derive
the asteroid’s effective diameter, geometric albedo and beaming
parameter η. In this work, we concentrate on the thermal behavior
and we find a trend of increasing η (lower thermal fluxes and cooler
color temperatures) with increasing solar phase angle. The slope of this
trend is somewhat different from that reported for other NEAs (e.g.,
Delbó 2004); if confirmed, this result
would indicate that the thermal behavior of low-perihelion asteroids is
different from that of other members of the NEA population. In addition,
deviations of the observed continuum from the thermal model, which can
be diagnostic of composition, are apparent in a few of our targets. A
complete characterization of these intrinsically faint objects will
benefit from the large ground based facilities described elsewhere in
these proceedings.
Related projects
Minor Bodies of the Solar System
This project studies the physical and compositional properties of the so-called minor bodies of the Solar System, that includes asteroids, icy objects, and comets. Of special interest are the trans-neptunian objects (TNOs), including those considered the most distant objects detected so far (Extreme-TNOs or ETNOs); the comets and the comet-asteroid
Julia de
León Cruz