Spitzer Space Telescope - Archive Research Proposal #30213


The Spitzer Asteroid Catalog

Principal Investigator: David Trilling
           Institution: University of Arizona

Co-Investigators: 
Bidushi Bhattacharya, SSC                                             
Myra Blaylock, University of Arizona                                  
John Stansberry, University of Arizona                                
Mark Sykes, PSI                                                       
Lawrence Wasserman, Lowell Observatory                                

Science Category: asteroids 
Dollars Approved: 99881.0 

Abstract:
We propose to catalog fluxes and derive sizes and albedos for all
asteroids with small positional uncertainties that appear
serendipitously in publicly available IRAC and MIPS archive data.  We
will make at least 25,000  independent measurements.  Our results will
help extend the small end of the asteroid size frequency distribution
of main belt and Jupiter Trojan asteroids;  reveal compositional
gradients and remove compositional degeneracies;  look for common
properties among asteroid families;  and serve as a fundamental
database of asteroid properties for the coming decades.  The SSC
asteroid identification tools are inadequate for this task and
furthermore provide no analysis of asteroid data.  We have developed
and demonstrate a pilot automated pipeline capable of extracting
asteroid detections from IRAC and MIPS imaging data products and
generating a first order catalog of fluxes, albedos, and diameters.
This pipeline will be applied to the entire publicly accessible
Spitzer imaging archive.  The results will be published in refereed
papers and in NASA's peer-reviewed Planetary Data System.