Thermal properties of slow asteroids

However, thermal inertias have been determined mainly for fast rotators due to selection effects in the available photometry used to obtain shape models required for thermophysical modelling (TPM). Our aims are to mitigate these selection effects by producing shape models of slow rotators, to scale them and compute their thermal inertia with TPM, and to verify whether thermal inertia increases with the rotation period.

To decrease the bias against slow rotators, we conducted a photometric observing campaign of main-belt asteroids with periods longer than 12h, from multiple stations worldwide, adding in some cases data from WISE and Kepler space telescopes. For spin and shape reconstruction we used the lightcurve inversion method, and to derive thermal inertias we applied a thermophysical model to fit available infrared data from IRAS, AKARI, and WISE.