MAIN BELT ASTEROIDS WITH WISE/NEOWISE. I. PRELIMINARY ALBEDOS AND DIAMETERS

By J. Masiero, A. Mainzer, T. Grav, J. Bauer, R. Cutri, J. Dailey, Peter Eisenhardt, R. Mcmillan, T. Spahr, M. Skrutskie and 8 more. 2011

355 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present initial results from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a four-band all-sky thermal infrared survey that produces data well suited for measuring the physical properties of asteroids, and the NEOWISE enhancement to the WISE mission allowing for detailed study of solar system objects. Using a NEATM thermal model fitting routine, we compute diameters for over 100,000 Main Belt asteroids from their IR thermal flux, with errors better than 10%. We then incorporate literature values of visible measurements (in the form of the H absolute magnitude) to determine albedos. Using these data we investigate the albedo and diameter distributions of the Main Belt. As observed previously, we find a change in the average albedo when comparing the inner, middle, and outer portions of the Main Belt. We also confirm that the albedo distribution of each region is strongly bimodal. We observe groupings of objects with similar albedos in regions of the Main Belt associated with dynamical breakup families. Asteroid families typically show a characteristic albedo for all members, but there are notable exceptions to this. This paper is the first look at the Main Belt asteroids in the WISE data, and only represents the preliminary, observed raw size, and albedo distributions for the populations considered. These distributions are subject to survey biases inherent to the NEOWISE data set and cannot yet be interpreted as describing the true populations; the debiased size and albedo distributions will be the subject of the next paper in this series.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/350732999407aa29320b3ae1a05d7b230772367e

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Citations in the corpus

INITIAL PERFORMANCE OF THE NEOWISE REACTIVATION MISSION (2014, neutral): “The correspondence between pIR/pV and taxonomic type for NEOs, MBAs, Hilda-group asteroids, and Jovian Trojans is described in Mainzer et al. (2011e, 2012b); Masiero et al. (2011); Grav et al. (2012a,b).”
NEOWISE OBSERVATIONS OF NEAR-EARTH OBJECTS: PRELIMINARY RESULTS (2011, background): “Using the albedo distributions for different taxonomic classes derived from large Main Belt asteroids introduces an unknown error, and the error estimates we quote here must be regarded as lower limits.”
Identification and Dynamical Properties of Asteroid Families (2015, neutral): “…et al., 2005; Nesvorný et al., 2005; Gil-Hutton, 2006; Parker et al., 2008; Nesvorný, 2010, 2012; Novaković et al., 2011; Brož et al., 2013; Masiero et al., 2011, 2013; Carruba et al., 2013a; Milani et al., 2014), we attempt to build a consensus that could serve as a starting point…”
Density of asteroids (2012, background): “Among the C-complex, B-types have distinct surface properties: negative spectral slope in the visible and higher albedo (see the compilation of albedo per taxonomic class from Ryan and Woodward (2010); Usui et al. (2011); Masiero et al. (2011)).”
Absolute magnitudes of asteroids and a revision of asteroid albedo estimates from WISE thermal observations (2012, neutral): “…Satellite (IRAS) , the Wide-ﬁeld Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) , AKARI and the Spitzer Space Telescope resulted in estimates of diameters and albedos for thousands of asteroids (e.g., Tedesco et al., 2002; Mainzer et al., 2011a,b; Masiero et al., 2011; Usui et al., 2011; Ryan and Woodward, 2011).”
Asteroid family ages (2015, neutral): “e families listed in Table 2 at the Supplementary material web site. In Table 2 we show the albedo value of the namesake asteroid, with its uncertainty and the appropriate reference: W for WISE data (Masiero et al., 2011), I for IRAS, S for (Shepard et al., 2008), and A for AKARI. In some cases albe”
The Compositional Structure of the Asteroid Belt (2015, background): “Combined with the more recent NEOWISE survey that produced over a hundred thousand diameters and albedo estimates (Mainzer et al., 2011, Masiero et al., 2011) there now exists a treasure trove of physical measurements to analyze.”