Asteroid rotation periods from TESS

A comparison with the literature (whenever avail- able) reveals very good agreement and validates the approach presented here. Our approach also highlights cases for which the determination of the period should be considered invalid. The dataset presented here confirms the apparent small number of asteroids with a rotation between 50 and 100h, correlated with diameter.

The amplitude of the light curves is found to increase toward smaller diameters, as asteroids become less and less spherical. Finally, there is a systematic difference between the broad C and S complex in the amplitude- period, revealing the statistically lower density of C types compared to S type asteroids. Our approach to the determination of asteroid rotation period is based on simple concepts yet robust and can be applied to large corpora of time serie photometry, such as those extracted from exoplanet transit surveys.