The Spitzer Asteroid Catalog III: The Pan-STARRS 1 era

Understanding the global properties of the asteroid population today gives us insight into the processes, compositions, and timescales of planet formation as well as the post-formation dynamical evolution that sculpted our Solar System. Asteroids appear serendipitously in a significant fraction of every Spitzer image taken. We propose to continue building the Spitzer Asteroid Catalog by identifying, extracting, cataloging, and analyzing serendipitous observations of asteroids in the Spitzer archive by extending our work into the revolutionizing Pan-STARRS 1 era. Our results to date show that the the biggest source of error by far is bad visible magnitudes. It is also clear that our catalog is limited by the sensitivity of current ground-based surveys. Data from Pan-STARRS 1 will improve orbits and photometry to such an extent that the useful size of the Spitzer Asteroid Catalog will at least double, and in time increase to ~100,000 asteroids. We will derive sizes and albedos for all of these asteroids. The resulting databases will allow rich science investigations into the composition, evolution, and dynamical history of the asteroid belt and be a legacy of the Spitzer Space Telescope for decades to come.