In the framework of the MANOS program, I have been working on an automated data analysis pipeline for calibrated asteroid photometry and astrometry from imaging data. This pipeline, which can be applied to any kind of point source observations, is now in a robust state and available through github. For details on the pipeline, please refer to official publication (see below). Resources Mommert, M. (2017), “PHOTOMETRYPIPELINE: An automated pipeline for calibrated photometry”, Astronomy and Computing, 18, 47., publication, arxiv

One long-standing question is: how many asteroids - especially near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) - were comets in the past? In the classical conception, comets have surface ices and form tails and comae in the vicinity of the Sun; asteroids are simply rocks in space. In the recent years, the two classifications became less clear than that. Comets can end up on orbits that bring them close to the Earth. We can observe them. But what happens to them after spending a while there? For some comets, like ISON, being close to the Sun is fatal; they simply disintegrate and disappear. For other comets in near-Earth space, the strong degree of insolation forces them to lose their surface ices quickly and eventually their activity stops - they are dead or dormant comets. Since comet surfaces have very low albedos, these dead comets simply look like low-albedo asteroids and are really hard to identify. ...

The understanding of the compositional distribution of NEOs is important to reconstruct their dynamical and physical evolution, assess the damage potential in case of an impact, and estimate the resources that can be obtained from these bodies in the not-so-far future. Also, there is still a discrepancy between the compositional distribution of meteoritic material found on Earth and the overall composition of the NEO distribution. The most common way to investigate the compositions of asteroids is to perform spectroscopic observations: wavelength-dependent variations of the surface reflectance can be diagnostic for the composition of an object and allow for a taxonomic classification. However, spectroscopic observations are usually only possible for bright and large asteroids and require large telescopes for small asteroids. ...

Little is known about the physical properties of the smallest NEOs with diameters of less than 10 meters. Due to their small sizes, they are usually very faint and hard to observe. Hence, only a small number of asteroids in this size regime are known and for only very few of those physical properties like diameter and albedo have been measured. However, small NEOs are much more frequent than larger NEOs, making some of these objects easily accessible spacecraft targets and potential impactors. Traditionally, people believed that these small NEOs have formed through collisions and that they are individual slabs of rock, i.e,. monolithic bodies. ...

Part of the NEO population is considered to consist of so-called dead comets. Dead comets are comets that have spent a long time as NEOs and have been depleted their volatile inventories in numerous, close encounters with the Sun, i.e., they are extinct comets. They can be identified through their distinctive comet-like orbits and their low, comet-like albedos. The dead comet archetype is NEO (3552) Don Quixote. We observed Don Quixote as part of the ExploreNEOs program, in which ~600 NEOs were observed to derive the diameters and albedos of these objects. Our observations at 3.6 and 4.5 µm were saturated because the target was brighter than expect, revealing something rather unexpected. ...

Plutinos are a subpopulation of the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), which are pristine and icy objects on the outskirts of the Solar System. The orbits of Plutinos - which are named after their prototype, Pluto - are in 2:3 resonance with Neptune, meaning that by the time a Plutino performs 2 full orbits around the Sun, Neptune performs 3. This “mean motion resonance” provides a high degree of stability to the orbits of Plutinos. Hence, Plutinos are dynamically and physically pristine objects. ...