paper

Shape models of asteroids based on lightcurve observations with BlueEye600 robotic observatory

arXiv:1707.03637 · doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2017.07.005

Abstract

We present physical models, i.e. convex shapes, directions of the rotation axis, and sidereal rotation periods, of 18 asteroids out of which 10 are new models and 8 are refined models based on much larger data sets than in previous work. The models were reconstructed by the lightcurve inversion method from archived publicly available lightcurves and our new observations with BlueEye600 robotic observatory. One of the new results is the shape model of asteroid (1663)~van~den~Bos with the rotation period of 749\,hr, which makes it the slowest rotator with known shape. We describe our strategy for target selection that aims at fast production of new models using the enormous potential of already available photometry stored in public databases. We also briefly describe the control software and scheduler of the robotic observatory and we discuss the importance of building a database of asteroid models for studying asteroid physical properties in collisional families.

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