A Fast Ellipsoid Model for Asteroids Inverted From Lightcurves

TL;DR

This paper introduces a rapid method to reconstruct asteroid shapes as ellipsoids from lightcurve data, enabling estimation of physical parameters with reasonable accuracy using a curvature-based brightness integration and optimization techniques.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, efficient approach for asteroid shape modeling from lightcurves assuming an ellipsoid shape, improving speed and simplicity over existing methods.

Findings

Accurate estimation of asteroid physical parameters

Generation of simple ellipsoid shape models

Effective use of curvature function and Lebedev Quadrature

Abstract

The research about asteroids attracts more and more attention recently, especially focusing on their physical structures, such as the spin axis, the rotation period and the shape. The long distance between Earth observers and asteroids makes it impossible to get the shape and other parameters of asteroids directly with the exception of the NEAs (Near Earth Asteroids) and others passed by some spacecrafts. Generally photometric measurement is still the main way to obtain the research data for asteroids now, i.e. the lightcurves recording the brightness and positions of asteroids. Supposing that the shape of the asteroid is a triaxial ellipsoid with a stable spinning status, a new method is present in this article to reconstruct the shape models of asteroids from the lightcurves, with the other physical parameters together. By applying a special curvature function, the method calculates the brightness integration on a unit sphere and Lebedev Quadrature is employed for the discretization. At last the method searches the optimal solution by Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm to minimize the residual of the brightness. By adopting this method not only related physical parameters of asteroids can be obtained at a reasonable accuracy, but also a simple shape model of Ellipsoid can be generated for reconstructing more sophisticated shape model further.