Senior Research Associate
Planetary Science Institute
neese
@psi.edu
Research Interests:
Physical studies of main-belt and near-earth asteroids
Population of faint comets
Sun-grazer comets
Detection of transneptunian objects
Binary asteroids
Current Projects:
Asteroid Subnode, Planetary Data System
Carol coordinates the archiving of groundbased and spacecraft data
on asteroids and interplanetary dust, as part of the Asteroid/Dust Subnode
of NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS). Current archiving projects include
the data from the Hayabusa mission, a Japanese sample-return
mission to the asteroid Itokawa, as well as Dawn, a mission to the large
asteroids Vesta and Ceres, and the data from the dust instruments
on Cassini, Galileo, and Ulysses. Past archiving projects include the
NEAR mission to the asteroid Eros, and groundbased data including
asteroid spectra, lightcurves, polarimetry,
and radar data, as well as asteroid family classifications, albedos,
proper elements, and many others. The complete archive
can be accessed at the PDS
Asteroid Subnode web site.
Sub-Kilometer Asteroid Diameter Survey
This program to characterize the size distribution of small main-belt
asteroids involves PSI scientists Davis and Neese as well as
collaborators Gladman, Petit, Jedicke, and others. The data, taken
during a six night observing run with the KPNO 4m mosaic camera, included over
500 images covering an area of nine square degrees to a limiting
magnitude of R=23.5. During 2002, a massive moving object detection
code was used to detect approximately 1000-1300 asteroids per night,
which were tracked from night to night. These detections have been
linked to determine orbits and hence size estimates for the asteroids,
and the data are currently being debiased and analyzed to determine
a size distribution for the main belt down to sub-km diameters.
