Albedo Corrections for High Albedo Near Earth Objects Observed With Spitzer
Abstract
Thermal infrared observations are the most effective way to measure asteroid diameter and albedo. Major surveys like NEOWISE and NEOSurvey return a small fraction of objects with albedo values higher than that believed to exist in the near-Earth object (NEO) population. About 10% of Spitzer-observed NEOs have nominal albedo solutions greater than 0.5. There are many possible causes for these unrealistically high albedos, including thermal lightcurves (leading to a mis-estimate of asteroid diameter) or inaccurate absolute visual magnitudes (either from poor photometry or lightcurve effects). We present here the results of a ground-based optical photometric study of 36 high albedo NEOs from NEOSurvey (Trilling et al. 2016) using measurements from the Discovery Channel Telescope. Our findings indicate that uncertainty in the diameter has the most impact on the derived albedo of our targets, while the uncertainty in the H-magnitude and slope parameter have smaller effects. We supply corrected albedos for our target list, as well as a systematic offset dependent on the solar phase angle of the object (Mommert el al. 2017). These corrected albedo values will help constrain the albedo range in the population to better reflect its physical characteristics. This work is based in part on the observations made 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 NASA through an award issued by JPL/Caltech.
- Publication:
-
AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts #49
- Pub Date:
- October 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017DPS....4911007G