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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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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.