Characterizing serendipitously observed asteroids

[christinahedges]

Beyond the objects that were targeted by K2, many objects moved through the K2 focal plane during observations that were not specifically targeted. This is particularly interesting in superstamps, where large portions of the focal plane, often hundreds of pixels across, were downlinked from the telescope. These large continuous stamps provide the opportunity to measure light curves for serendipitously observed Solar System objects and produce valuable estimates of rotation rates without the need to obtain more ground based data.

Because K2 observed fields in the ecliptic plane, the data set is thought to contain a significant number of uncatalogued objects. No uniform search for such objects has been carried out across the data archive to date (to our knowledge), although the idea has successfully been demonstrated on the large K2 superstamp masks which were collected to observe Uranus and Neptune (Szab´o et al. 2016; Moln´ar et al. 2018). Discovering new Solar System objects in the K2 data set may yield interesting information on fast moving and Interior-Earth Objects (IEOs), which are difficult to identify from the ground.

[rpoleski]

New paper in this topic - rotation periods derived for asteroids serendipitously observed in C9 superstamp: Podlewska-Gaca et al. 2021