Lowell Photometric Database asteroid models

For asteroids from the main belt, most of the shape models available now have been reconstructed from disk-integrated photometry by the lightcurve inversion method. We want to significantly enlarge the current sample (~350) of available asteroid models.

We use the lightcurve inversion method to derive new shape models and spin states of asteroids from the sparse-in-time photometry compiled in the Lowell Photometric Database. To speed up the time-consuming process of scanning the period parameter space through the use of convex shape models, we use the distributed computing project Asteroids@home, running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform.