DEMEO , Francesca E.

Differentiated asteroids are rare in the main asteroid belt despite evidence for ˜100 distinct differentiated bodies in the meteorite record. We have sought to understand why so few main belt asteroids differentiated and where those differentiated bodies or fragments reside. Using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to search for a needle in a...

Space weathering to redden asteroid surfaces by the solar wind appears to be a very rapid (

We present reflectance spectra from 0.4 to 2.4 mum of Asteroid (101955) 1999 RQ36, the target of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft mission. The visible spectral data were obtained at the McDonald Observatory 2.1-m telescope with the ES2 spectrograph. The infrared spectral data were obtained at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility using the SpeX...

We report 491 new near-infrared spectroscopic measurements of 420 near-Earth objects (NEOs) collected on the NASA InfraRed Telescope Facility as part of the MIT-Hawaii NEO Spectroscopic Survey. These measurements were combined with previously published data from Binzel et al. and bias-corrected to derive the intrinsic compositional distribution...

In this work we identify spectral similarities between asteroids and meteorites. Using spectral features such as absorption bands and spectral curvature, we identify spectral matches between 500 asteroid spectra and over 1,000 samples of RELAB meteorite spectra over visible plus near-infrared wavelengths (0.45- 2 . 5 μm). We reproduce and...