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A. Le Bras (Observatoire de Paris, Paris)
Reflectance spectroscopy of asteroids permits to infer the mineral composition of their surface. Since spectral mineral features are sensitive to surface parameters such as grain size, regolith compactness, temperature, maturity,... the interpretation of remote-sensing asteroids spectra is not easy nor unique. Asteroids family members show a continuous dispersion of their spectral characteristics (Doressoudiram et al., 1997) which seems to be due first to a compositional variation but also to some space weathering processes. Space weathering may contribute to the spectral dispersion of the smallest S-type asteroids too.
New laboratory spectra are required in order to understand the influence of surface parameters and space weathering effects, and to interpret the recent high-spectral resolution observations from ISO. We started an experimental program at Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (Orsay, France), using the 2.5-120 microns interferometer spectrometer, to study the influence of surface parameters on mineral features. First, we study grain size effects with two types of terrestrial rocks: anorthosite (bright) and basalt (dark) in the 2-40 microns range. In a second part, we will extend our experiments to other samples (meteorites and asteroid-like mixtures), and to the visible and NIR range. We present the experimental setup and the preliminary results obtained for 6 different grain size ranges with basalt and anorthosite.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: aurelie.lebras@obspm.fr