Rotation rates of decameter scale near Earth asteroids

Asteroids larger than a few hundred meters in diameter exhibit an upper limit in their rotation rates at 2.2 hours because they are weakly bound rubble piles. The transition in that diameter range is thought to represent the boundary between monolithic asteroids and rubble piles, but there are as-yet few constraints on the tensile strength of decameter scale asteroids. We present lightcurves and rotation periods for two dozen small near Earth objects (NEOs) using sets of minute-long exposures from CFHT-Megacam and demonstrate a new rapid-response technique for extracting lightcurves of these small asteroids. We confirm the previously measured rotation periods for 2016 GE1, 2016 EL157 and 2016 EN156, report a dozen new periods, with the rest of our sample presenting ambiguous lightcurves. The g–i and r–i colors for most of the objects in our sample allow us to classify our asteroids into appropriate taxa.