Speaker
Description
The radiometric method has proven highly effective in determining the sizes and albedo of asteroids and near-Earth objects (NEOs). This technique involves measuring the heat flux from these objects in the thermal infrared using telescopes, and modeling these observations as a function of size and other physical parameters. The values of these parameters are constrained by achieving the best fit between the model and the observed data.
While tremendous progress in our understanding of the NEO population has been achieved through the successful use of simple thermal models, these models are still based on the assumption that NEOs are spherical, and they treat surface temperature distribution using geometric approximations. However, knowledge of NEO shapes from independent techniques, such as optical lightcurve inversion and radar observations, enables the use of more sophisticated thermophysical models (TPMs).
I will review the various flavors of TPMs currently available in the literature, as well as the latest results based on these TPMs, focusing on their accuracy in determining the sizes of NEOs compared to other techniques and also presenting ancillary physical properties TPM can be used to constrain.
As technology and observational techniques advance, more data is becoming available. I will present a vision for the imminent era of large infrared and optical surveys, such as NASA’s NEO Surveyor and ESA’s NEO-MIR on the infrared side, and the LSST telescope at the Vera Rubin Observatory, ATLAS, and ESA’s Fly-Eye on the visible side. The clear path is towards combining these multi-epochs and multiwavelength data by means of holistic asteroid physical models (HPM).
