NSF Award
1518127
One of the fundamental questions scientists are trying to address is "what is the history of our Solar System?" Recent discoveries of the enormous variety of planetary systems around stars beyond the Sun have only increased our curiosity about our own planetary system and why it appears the way it does. One of the key tools to study the entire history of our Solar System is its Asteroid Belt, since that traces the migration of the giant planets, as well as epochs of major change and collisions, and it contains samples from nearly the entire suite of Solar System material from its very beginning. This project will attempt to better identify families of asteroids that record the history of catastrophic asteroid collisions. <br/><br/>The project team will capitalize on the experience of one of the Co-PIs with developing visualizations by developing a visualization product specifically with planetariums in mind. The visualization product they intend to produce will be called "When Asteroids Collide" and will engagingly visualize the structure and compositional make-up of the Asteroid Belt and its evolution in time. It will highlight the creation and evolution of families across the asteroid belt and throughout time and help explain complicated asteroid dynamics. The visualization will be circulated through the network of planetariums that have already reached out to Co-PI, as well as through the online and film festival avenues that he has used successfully to share his work with very broad audiences.<br/><br/>The census of known asteroid families is clearly incomplete as a function of time, across all types of asteroids, and across all regions of the Asteroid Belt. This project would calibrate the project team's current techniques to understand their detection biases, and to develop new techniques to better extract and characterize these families in current and future datasets. It will be accomplished by building a calibration testbed using synthetic families implanted in current asteroid datasets to calibrate asteroid family detection tools, building new family detection tools utilizing the orbital elements and the known size-dependent Yarkovsky spreading of as a function of size, calibrating old and new tools and using them to create a de-biased census of the asteroid belt families as a function of their age, size and physical properties.
