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及其为什么会出现这样的现象的好奇心。研究太阳系整个历史的关键工具之一是它的小行星带，因为它可以追溯巨行星的迁移，以及重大变化和碰撞的时代，它包含了几乎整个太阳系物质从一开始就有的样本。该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。项目小组将利用其中一名合作伙伴在开发可视化方面的经验，开发一种专门针对天文馆的可视化产品。他们打算生产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随时间的演化。它将突出整个小行星带和整个时间的家族的创建和演化，并有助于解释复杂的小行星动力学。可视化图像将通过已经联系到Co-Pi的天文馆网络以及他成功地与非常广泛的观众分享他的工作的在线和电影节渠道进行传播。对已知小行星家族的普查显然不是随着时间的函数而完成的，涉及所有类型的小行星，以及小行星带的所有区域。该项目将校准项目团队目前的技术，以了解它们的检测偏差，并开发新的技术，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。为实现这一目标，将利用植入当前小行星数据集中的合成族建立一个校准试验台，以校准小行星家族探测工具；利用轨道元素和已知的关于小行星大小的Yarkovsky扩散建立新的家族探测工具；校准新旧工具，并利用这些工具根据小行星带家族的年龄、大小和物理性质进行无偏见的普查。

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.