Isaac Newton Telescope Group | 2019 Oct 17
The study of Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) is driven by both scientific and practical reasons. Because of their proximity to our planet, they can provide key information regarding the delivery of water and organic-rich material to the early Earth, and the subsequent emergence of life. On the other hand, these small bodies of the Solar System have non-negligible long-term probabilities of colliding with the Earth, and can be targets of future space exploration.
In the framework of the EURONEAR collaboration, a group of astronomers performed a spectroscopic survey of NEAs using the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) equipped with the Intermediate Dispersion Spectrograph (IDS). ... The goal of this collaborative work was to characterise spectroscopically a significant sample of NEAs with sizes in the range of 0.25-5.5 km (categorised as large). The sizes of the asteroids are determined by their absolute magnitudes (the distribution of absolute magnitudes of the observed objects is shown in Figure 1) and by their surface properties (albedos), which can be inferred from spectroscopy.
The team of astronomers found that the population of NEAs shows a large variety of objects in terms of physical and dynamical properties. Broadly, it matches the composition patterns of the Inner Main Asteroid Belt (located at heliocentric distance between 2.2 and 2.5 astronomical units), which is the likely source region of these bodies. However, they show spectral differences because NEAs are subject to planetary approaches, energetic micrometeorite bombardment, strong solar wind and radiation effects. ...
Near-Earth Asteroids Spectroscopic Survey at Isaac Newton Telescope ~ M. Popescu et al
- Astronomy & Astrophysics 627:A124 (July 2019) DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201935006
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1905.12997 > 30 May 2019 (v1), 04 Jun 2019 (v2)