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Document Type
Oral Presentation
Department
Physics
Faculty Mentor
Julie Ziffer, PhD
Abstract
With millions of data points on hundreds of thousands of asteroids, scientists still know relatively little about the physical properties of these bodies. Concern over asteroid composition and trajectory in reference to possible Earth impacts underlines the importance of the uncertainties in the data collected. Scientists and Planetary Defense are interested in how to utilize asteroid composition data to mitigate effects of impacts with Earth. Their work depends on the precision of the composition data collected.
Methods: Data manipulation and statistical methods were used to estimate and compare uncertainties for 3.5 x 107 data points for 58,956 unique small body main belt asteroids, using two Sloan databases. Photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object Catalog (SDSS MOC, EAR-A-I0035-3-SDSSMOC-V3.0 ) was subdivided based on broad classes assigned through the SDSS-based Asteroid Taxonomy V1.0 (Mothe-Diniz, T., Roig, F., and Carvano, J.M., Mothe-Diniz) analysis.
Results: SDSS data was scrubbed for “missing constants” and irrelevant data (asteroids with less than five SDSS observations), refining it to 4,315 unique asteroids. This clean set of photometric data will now be normalized and analyzed for composition variability by classification which will help define the best statistical analyses to use to find true variability of asteroid composition.
Lisa Struebing Presentation Transcript
Open Access?
1
Analyzing SDSS Small Body Asteroid Data Based on Carvano Results
With millions of data points on hundreds of thousands of asteroids, scientists still know relatively little about the physical properties of these bodies. Concern over asteroid composition and trajectory in reference to possible Earth impacts underlines the importance of the uncertainties in the data collected. Scientists and Planetary Defense are interested in how to utilize asteroid composition data to mitigate effects of impacts with Earth. Their work depends on the precision of the composition data collected.
Methods: Data manipulation and statistical methods were used to estimate and compare uncertainties for 3.5 x 107 data points for 58,956 unique small body main belt asteroids, using two Sloan databases. Photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object Catalog (SDSS MOC, EAR-A-I0035-3-SDSSMOC-V3.0 ) was subdivided based on broad classes assigned through the SDSS-based Asteroid Taxonomy V1.0 (Mothe-Diniz, T., Roig, F., and Carvano, J.M., Mothe-Diniz) analysis.
Results: SDSS data was scrubbed for “missing constants” and irrelevant data (asteroids with less than five SDSS observations), refining it to 4,315 unique asteroids. This clean set of photometric data will now be normalized and analyzed for composition variability by classification which will help define the best statistical analyses to use to find true variability of asteroid composition.
