Slope trends within Main Belt asteroid families using the SDSS Moving Object Catalog

Past work has shown that the space weathering process has different effects on the observed spectral slope of an asteroid depending on the spectral type (e.g., Nesvorny et al. 2005). To investigate the range of spectral slope trends in families of various taxonomic types, we used the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Moving Object Catalog 4 (MOC4, Ivezic et al 2002). Work by Thomas et al. (2012) demonstrated that the SDSS could be used to investigate the spectral change associated with space weathering within a single asteroid family. We used a similar process to study many other families within the SDSS MOC4. Family members were identified using the Nesvorny (2015) lists of dynamical family membership. We implemented a number of rejection criteria (including error flags and cutoffs for known unreliable apparent magnitudes) to ensure the photometric accuracy of each observation included in our study. We will present the trends in spectrophotometric slope with respect to size for each family in our sample and discuss how these trends vary by taxonomic type.