Speaker
Description
Asteroid phase curves provide insights into their surface properties. In particular, the surge of brightness towards low phase angles (opposition effect) and the change in brightness with change in phase angle (photometric slope) are function of the surface composition and particle properties. This dependence opens up phase curves to taxonomic classification of asteroids, a process that has traditionally relied on spectroscopic data.
In this presentation, I will introduce the fundamentals of asteroid taxonomy, outlining the major taxonomic classes and the criteria used to categorise them.
I will then explore how phase curve analysis can be integrated into this classification system. Phase curves offer a complementary method to spectral data, akin to albedo observations, while providing an independent and more accessible means of determining asteroid types. This is particularly valuable for asteroids that are too faint to observe spectroscopically or where spectral data may be ambiguous.
I will present recent efforts to model the phase curves of hundreds of thousands of asteroids and the challenges that we still face in order to extract reliable compositional information from these serendipitous observations.
