Lowell Photometric Database asteroid models. II.

The search for best-fitting models was done in the framework of the Asteroids@home distributed computing project. By processing the data for almost 75000 asteroids, we derived unique shape models for about 900 of them. Some of them were already available in the DAMIT database and served us as a consistency check of our approach.

In total, we derived new models for 662 asteroids, which significantly increased the total number of asteroids for which their rotation state and shape are known. For another 789 asteroids, we were able to determine their sidereal rotation period and estimate the ecliptic latitude of the spin axis direction. We studied the distribution of spins in the asteroid population.

Apart from updating the statistics for the dependence of the distribution on asteroid size, we revealed a significant discrepancy between the number of prograde and retrograde rotators for asteroids smaller than about 10km. Combining optical photometry with thermal infrared light curves is an efficient approach to obtaining new physical models of asteroids. The amount of asteroid photometry is continuously growing and joint inversion of data from different surveys could lead to thousands of new models in the near future.