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Update on Binary Asteroid Discoveries at the Center for Solar System Studies

Presentation #107.05 in the session “Ground-Based Asteroid Surveys”.

Published onOct 26, 2020
Update on Binary Asteroid Discoveries at the Center for Solar System Studies

The Center for Solar Systems Studies (CS3) is located in the California high desert at Landers, about 20 miles northwest of Joshua Tree National Park. For this work, we used seven telescopes located in four observatories with roll off roofs. The facility is fully robotic with local computers running the telescope/camera software as well opening and closing the roofs via Internet accessible power switches. The CS3 computers are accessed via the Internet using remote desktop software so that we can monitor operations and change scripts to work new targets when needed. Since inception in 2013, CS3 has observed on more than 2,000 nights or about 76% of the time. As of 2020 August 05, we obtained dense lightcurves for 2,021 distinct objects, observing 300 of them multiple times. Almost 900 of the distinct objects observed were NEAs. In this time frame, we observed 127 confirmed or suspected binary asteroids. This represents almost 26% of all of the confirmed or suspected binary asteroids reported in the Lightcurve Database for that time frame. We will present results and lightcurves for 4 recent binary discoveries; 1656 Suomi, 5817 Robertfrazer, (85275) 1994 LY, and (85628) 1998 KV2.

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