Asteroid

Don Quixote was discovered in 1983 and although it has a perfectly comet-like orbit, no cometary activity (a tail or a coma around the object) have been observed. According to protocol, the object was listed as an asteroid. In 2009, we found from observations with the now defunct Spitzer Space Telescope that there actually is a faint coma around Don Quixote that most likely consists of molecular band emission from either CO or CO2. This is discussed in detail here and in this paper. ...

TESS is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which was launched into space by NASA in 2018 to identify faint brightness variations in stars that are characteristic of planets orbiting around and transiting in front of these stars. A rendering of the TESS spacecraft. The instrument consists of four imaging cameras, each covering 24° x 24° of the sky. Over the course of its nominal two-year mission, TESS will monitor more than 200,000 stars with the photometric accuracy necessary to identify exoplanet transits. In order to observe this huge number of stars, TESS points at different “Sectors” in the sky, amounting to a total of 85% of the entire sky. Each Sector spanning 24° x 96° is observed over a period of about one month. ...

The ESA mission Gaia not only observes a good fraction of the stars in the milky way, but also a huge number of asteroids. Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) is the first data release to include a number of asteroid observations, limited to G magnitudes (no color information) and a pre-selected sample of 14099 asteroids from different populations. For each asteroids, DR2 contains a median number of 9 observations over the first 9 months of the mission. While this limited data set does not allow for deriving the targets’ rotational periods or constraining their taxonomic types, it is useful for a look into the shape distribution of asteroids. ...