Asteroid Belt History through a Calibrated Survey of Asteroid Families

科学家们试图解决的一个基本问题是“我们太阳系的历史是怎样的？”最近在太阳以外的恒星周围发现了种类繁多的行星系统，这只会增加我们对我们自己的行星系统的好奇心，以及为什么它会出现这样的情况。研究太阳系整个历史的关键工具之一是它的小行星带，因为它追踪了巨行星的迁移，以及重大变化和碰撞的时代，它包含了几乎从一开始就来自太阳系所有物质的样本。这个项目将试图更好地识别记录灾难性小行星碰撞历史的小行星家族。项目团队将利用其中一位合作项目负责人在开发可视化方面的经验，开发一款专门针对天文馆的可视化产品。他们打算制作的可视化产品将被称为“当小行星碰撞时”，并将引人入胜地可视化小行星带的结构和成分组成及其演变。它将突出整个小行星带和整个时间的家庭的创造和进化，并帮助解释复杂的小行星动力学。可视化将通过已经与Co-PI联系的天文馆网络，以及通过他成功地与广泛观众分享他的作品的在线和电影节渠道传播。已知的小行星家族的普查显然是不完整的，作为时间的函数，在所有类型的小行星，在小行星带的所有地区。该项目将校准项目团队当前的技术，以了解其检测偏差，并开发新技术，以便在当前和未来的数据集中更好地提取和表征这些家族。它将通过建立一个校准测试平台，使用植入当前小行星数据集中的合成家族来校准小行星家族检测工具，利用轨道元素和已知的大小依赖Yarkovsky传播作为大小的函数构建新的家族检测工具，校准旧的和新的工具，并使用它们来创建一个无偏见的小行星带家族的普查，作为它们的年龄，大小和物理性质的函数。

One of the fundamental questions scientists are trying to address is "what is the history of our Solar System?" Recent discoveries of the enormous variety of planetary systems around stars beyond the Sun have only increased our curiosity about our own planetary system and why it appears the way it does. One of the key tools to study the entire history of our Solar System is its Asteroid Belt, since that traces the migration of the giant planets, as well as epochs of major change and collisions, and it contains samples from nearly the entire suite of Solar System material from its very beginning. This project will attempt to better identify families of asteroids that record the history of catastrophic asteroid collisions. The project team will capitalize on the experience of one of the Co-PIs with developing visualizations by developing a visualization product specifically with planetariums in mind. The visualization product they intend to produce will be called "When Asteroids Collide" and will engagingly visualize the structure and compositional make-up of the Asteroid Belt and its evolution in time. It will highlight the creation and evolution of families across the asteroid belt and throughout time and help explain complicated asteroid dynamics. The visualization will be circulated through the network of planetariums that have already reached out to Co-PI, as well as through the online and film festival avenues that he has used successfully to share his work with very broad audiences.The census of known asteroid families is clearly incomplete as a function of time, across all types of asteroids, and across all regions of the Asteroid Belt. This project would calibrate the project team's current techniques to understand their detection biases, and to develop new techniques to better extract and characterize these families in current and future datasets. It will be accomplished by building a calibration testbed using synthetic families implanted in current asteroid datasets to calibrate asteroid family detection tools, building new family detection tools utilizing the orbital elements and the known size-dependent Yarkovsky spreading of as a function of size, calibrating old and new tools and using them to create a de-biased census of the asteroid belt families as a function of their age, size and physical properties.