Europlanet Science Congress 2020
Virtual meeting
21 September – 9 October 2020
Europlanet Science Congress 2020
Virtual meeting
21 September – 9 October 2020
EPSC Abstracts
Vol.14, EPSC2020-727, 2020
https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2020-727
Europlanet Science Congress 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Far-infrared flux densities of main belt asteroids from serendipitous Herschel/PACS observations

Róbert Szakáts1, Csaba Kiss1,3, Anikó Farkas-Takács1, Gábor Marton1,3, Thomas Müller2, and András Pál1,3
Róbert Szakáts et al.
  • 1Konkoly Observatory, Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences, Budapest, Hungary (szakats.robert@csfk.mta.hu)
  • 2Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, Giesenbachstrasse, Garching, Germany
  • 3ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Institute of Physics, 1171 Budapest, Hungary

The Herschel Space Observatory had two imaging instruments, working in the far-infrared and submillimetre regimes: the PACS cameras at 70/100 and 160 μm and the SPIRE photometers at 250, 350 and 500 μm. Small solar system bodies, especially main belt asteroids were serendipitously present in the field of view mainly in large scan maps. We identified these objects with the original aim to mark the affected sources in the Herschel PACS and SPIRE Point Source Catalogues. In our present study we extracted flux densities in the PACS bands for asteroids above the detection limit, either using  existing standard data products from the Herschel Science Archive, or re-reducing the PACS maps in the co-moving frame of the target. We obtained ~600 new flux density values for 270 asteroids, a significant increase in the number of Herschel asteroid observations. These new flux densities will be included in the Small Bodies: Near and Far (SBNAF) Infrared Database (Szakáts et al., 2020). The fluxes obtained from Herschel are excellent for radiometric studies to get the object's size, albedo and maybe also thermal properties, when combined with other measurements (Alí-Lagoa et al., 2020).

How to cite: Szakáts, R., Kiss, C., Farkas-Takács, A., Marton, G., Müller, T., and Pál, A.: Far-infrared flux densities of main belt asteroids from serendipitous Herschel/PACS observations, Europlanet Science Congress 2020, online, 21 September–9 Oct 2020, EPSC2020-727, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc2020-727, 2020