Uncertainties on Asteroid Albedos Determined by Thermal Modeling
Abstract
We present an analysis of the accuracy of geometric albedos determined for asteroids through the modeling of observed thermal infrared radiation. We show that albedo uncertainty is dominated by the uncertainty on the measured HV absolute magnitude, and that any analysis using albedos in a statistical application will also be dominated by this source of uncertainty. For all but the small fraction of asteroids with a large amount of characterization data, improved knowledge of the HV magnitude will be fundamentally limited by incomplete phase-curve coverage, incomplete light-curve knowledge, and the necessary conversion from the observed band to the V band. Switching the absolute magnitude standard to a different band such a r' would mitigate the uncertainty due to band conversion for many surveys, but this only represents a small component of the total uncertainty. Therefore, techniques making use of these albedos must ensure that their uncertainties are properly accounted for.
Additional Information
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2020 November 19; revised 2020 December 21; accepted 2021 January 7; published 2021 February 23. We thank the referees Petr Pravec and Alan Harris for their helpful reviews that improved this paper. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System.Attached Files
Published - Masiero_2021_Planet._Sci._J._2_32.pdf
Accepted Version - 2101.02728.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 108222
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20210225-152341308
- Created
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2021-02-26Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)