The Limits of Simple Models for Understanding NEAs
Originally Posted: December 1, 2023
Next on the Catch Up Tour is my first paper of grad school which finally got published in January of 2023. The paper represents what most of my research work was spent on during my first 2.5 years of grad school.
Plain Language Summary
In general, the paper focuses on exploring the limits of using a very fast, but very rough, computer model for understanding important qualities of near-Earth asteroids. These models are often used to understand important information, like how big an asteroid is, because of their speed and ease of use. But, because these models make lots of assumptions about the asteroids, they can be prone to errors. This paper is a deep dive into one asteroid, 1998 QE2, looking at how well these models can really do. We show that in some situations, these models may give misleading information about an asteroid, which could lead us to be misinformed about things like what its made of or how dangerous it may be.
Science Abstract
Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are a key testbed for investigations into planet formation, asteroid dynamics, and planetary defense initiatives. These studies rely on understanding NEA sizes, albedo distributions, and regolith properties. Simple thermal models are a commonly used method for determining these properties, however they have inherent limitations due to the simplifying assumptions they make about asteroid shapes and properties. With the recent collapse of the Arecibo Telescope and a decrease of direct size measurements, as well as future facilities such as LSST and NEO Surveyor coming online soon, these models will play an increasingly important role in our knowledge of the NEA population. Therefore, it is key to understand the limits of these models. In this work we constrain the limitations of simple thermal models by comparing model results to more complex thermophysical models, radar data, and other existing analyses. Furthermore, we present a method for placing tighter constraints on inferred NEA properties using simple thermal models. These comparisons and constraints are explored using the NEA (285263) 1998 QE2 as a case study. We analyze QE2 with a simple thermal model and data from both the NASA IRTF SpeX instrument and NEOWISE mission. We determine an albedo between 0.05 and 0.10 and thermal inertia between 0 and 425 J m-2 s-1/2 K-1. We find that overall the simple thermal model is able to well constrain the properties of QE2, however we find that model uncertainties can be influenced by topography, viewing geometry, and the wavelength range of data used.