AAS 201st Meeting, January, 2003
Session 45. The Solar System
Poster, Tuesday, January 7, 2003, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall AB

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[45.06] The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object Catalog

M. Juric, Z. Ivezic, R.H. Lupton (Princeton Univ.)

Sloan Digital Sky Survey, although optimized for extragalactic science, is significantly contributing to solar system science by producing the largest available database of multi-color photometric measurements for asteroids. The database is public (http://www.sdss.org/science/index.html) and currently contains observations for about 60,000 objects. The main results derived from these early SDSS observations are

1) A measurement of the main-belt asteroid size distribution to a significantly smaller size limit (< 1 km) than possible before. The size distribution resembles a broken power-law, independent of the heliocentric distance.

2) A smaller number of asteroids compared to previous work. In particular, the number of asteroids with diameters larger than 1 km is about 700,000.

3) Asteroid dynamical families, defined as clusters in orbital parameter space, also strongly segregate in color space. Their distinctive optical colors support earlier suggestions that asteroids belonging to a particular family have a common origin. SDSS data indicate that over 90 percent of asteroids belong to families.


If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://www.sdss.org/science/index.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: ivezic@astro.princeton.edu, mjuric@astro.princeton.edu

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