KEEP-North : Kirkwood Excitation and Exile Patrol of the Northern Sky

보현산 천문대 소행성 관측 연구

An asteroid family is a group of asteroidal objects in the proper orbital element space (a, e, and i), considered to have been produced by a disruption of a large parent body through a catastrophic collision. Family members usually have similar surface properties such as spectral taxonomy types, colors, and visible geometric albedo with a same dynamical age. Therefore an asteroid family could be called as a natural Solar System laboratory and is also regarded as a powerful tool to investigate space weathering and non-gravitational phenomena such as the Yarkovsky/YORP effects. We carry out time series photometric observations for a number of asteroid families to obtain their physical properties, including sizes, shapes, rotational periods, spin axes, colors, and H-G parameters based on nearly round-the-clock observations, using several 0.5-2 meter class telescopes in the Northern hemisphere, including BOAO 1.8 m, LOAO 1.0 m, SOAO 0.6 m facilities in KASI, McDonald Observatory 2.1 m instrument, NARIT 2.4 m and TUG 1.0 m telescopes. This study is expected to find, for the first time, some important clues on the collisional history in our Solar System and the mechanisms where the family members are being transported from the resonance regions in the Main-belt to the near Earth space.