Watching Asteroids Evolve Through Spacecraft Surveys

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Abstract
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About a third of known asteroids are fragments of catastrophic collisions, each collision forming a family of objects with freshly exposed surfaces. These families provide evolutionary snapshots of how major ongoing processes in the solar system (such as collisions, space weathering, and solar torques) affect solid material. However, most asteroid surveys carry significant biases that make it difficult to know how many asteroids exist, especially toward small sizes that showcase these processes more prominently. In response, we built an end-to-end forward model of NASA's space-based WISE/NEOWISE survey. Our simulator runs synthetic asteroids through the real survey's cadence, viewing geometry, thermal flux, and detection logic to measure detection efficiency and use it to debias the size distributions of 35 major nearby asteroid families. I will show which correlations we found and which, surprisingly, we did not find.

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About the Speaker
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Dr. Sarah Sonnett is a Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute, based in the United States. She completed her graduate degrees in Astronomy in 2013 at the University of Hawaii, where she studied icy objects in the outer solar system through world-class telescopes, then continued as a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as part of the NEOWISE space mission science team. She has led and co-led research projects on small bodies from every corner of the solar system, through observations and simulations. She spent nine years working in planetary defense, during which she was the Deputy Lead of the Survey Simulator Team for NASA's upcoming NEO Surveyor mission. She also recently completed a three-year position as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the College of Charleston, in her hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. Her research continues to span a broad range of topics from planetary defense to astrobiology to solar system formation.