Date: Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Time: 1:00 pm/CT
Advisor: Dr. Tracy Becker
http://physics.utsa.edu/
“A Tale of Two Wavelengths: Characterizing (4) Vesta’s Thermal Evolution
with Infrared and Binary Near-Earth Asteroids with Radar”
Asteroids are the remnants of the solar system that never quite formed into or lasted as planets or planetesimals. These rocky and metallic objects provide virtual laboratories to study the early solar system and help to answer questions focused on how the solar sys-tem formed and evolved, what are the origins of water and mineral sources, and now to understand how active a role we can play in planetary protection. Infrared observations provide a way to probe an asteroid’s mineralogical makeup and hydration state, and therefore are key to understanding and contextualizing an asteroid’s composition. Radar is a powerful technique that enables acquiring precise astrometry and physical charac-teristics like size and rotation period of an asteroid and is therefore a crucial component to planetary protection. In this work, we report preliminary results on the thermal evolu-tion of (4) Vesta across 6 epochs between 2015-2021 using mid-infrared (MIR) SO-FIA+FORCAST calibrator target data. This work helps contextualize Dawn observations and represents the first analysis of long-baseline mid-infrared spectra for Vesta. We adapt SOFIA+FORCAST calibrator target data to be used as scientific observations and perform photometric analyses. We also report physical and mutual orbit characteristics of near-Earth, binary asteroid (163693) Atira. Using radar observations from the Arecibo Observatory and several apparitions of lightcurve observations from 2003 to 2019 with SHAPE modeling software, we determine the shape, size, rotational period, and mutual orbit of the primary and secondary components and the density of the primary compo-nent. We then present a research plan and science objectives of studying binary, near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) observed by Arecibo Observatory. We will characterize 6+ binary NEA systems, namely each component’s size, rotation period, and orientation, and de-termine densities, composition, and surface roughness to add to the context of NEAs and constrain binary asteroid formation and evolution models.