Asteroid spin and shape inversion for simulated Gaia photometry
D. Oszkiewicz*,1, K. Muinonen1,2 and T. Pieniluoma1
- 1 Department of Physics, P.O. box 64, FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
- 2 Finnish Geodetic Institute, P.O. box 15, FI-02431 Masala, Finland.
We present Markov-chain Monte-Carlo methods (MCMC) for the inversion of asteroid spins and shapes in the case of limited numbers of or sparsely distributed observations. We focus on convex optimization of asteroid spin and shape, obtaining realistic shape solutions, and exploring the regime of possible spin solutions. The asteroid shape is modeled as a triangulated surface with or without smoothing using bicubic splines. We apply the methods to simulated photometric data for the Gaia mission. We compare the inversion results obtained to the spin and shape originally used to generate the simulated photometric data.
- * Corresponding author