Spin and 3D shape model of Mars-crossing asteroid (2078) Nanking

Photometric investigations of asteroids allow us to determine their rotation states and shape models (Apostolovska et al. 2014). Our main target, asteroid (2078) Nanking's perihelion distance (q) is 1.480 AU, which belongs to the Mars-crossing asteroid (1.3 < q < 1.66 AU). Mars-crossing asteroids are objects that cross the orbit of Mars and regarded as one of the primary sources of near-Earth asteroids due to the unstable nature of their orbits. We present the analysis of the spin parameters and 3D shape model of (2078) Nanking. We conducted Cousins_R-band time-series photometry of this asteroid from November 26, 2014 to January 17, 2015 at the Sobaeksan Optical Astronomy Observatory (SOAO) and for 25 nights from March to April 2016 using the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) to reconstruct its physical model with our dense photometric datasets. Using the lightcurve inversion method (Kaasalainen & Torppa 2001; Kaasalainen et al. 2001), we determine the pole orientation and shape model of this object based on our lightcurves along with the archival data obtained from the literatures. We derived rotational period of 6.461 h, the preliminary ecliptic longitude (${\lambda}_p$) and latitude (${\beta}_p$) of its pole as ${\lambda}_p{\sim}8^{\circ}$ and ${\beta}_p{\sim}-52^{\circ}$ which indicates a retrograde rotation of the body. From the apparent W UMa-shaped lightcurve and its location in the rotation frequency-amplitude plot of Sheppard and Jewitt (2004), we suspect the contact binary nature of the body (Choi 2016).