FERRAIS , Marin

Until recently, only three large main belt asteroids, Ceres, Vesta and Lutetia, had been imaged with a high level of detail, as they were visited by the space missions Dawn and Rosetta of NASA and the European Space Agency, respectively. The previously small number of detailed observations of asteroids meant that, until now, key characteristics...

The degree of linear polarization of sunlight scattered by an asteroid contains valuable information for rapid characterization of the surface properties of Near-Earth objects (NEOs). In the case of atmosphereless bodies the state of linear polarization varies as a function of the phase angle (α) and is described using the so-called Pr...

In 2018, the near-Earth object (155140) 2005 UD (hereafter UD) experienced a close fly by of the Earth. We present results from an observational campaign involving photometric, spectroscopic, and polarimetric observations carried out across a wide range of phase angles (0°7-88°). We also analyze archival NEOWISE observations. We report an...

Abstract The surfaces of airless bodies like asteroids in the solar system are known to be affected by space weathering. Experiments simulating space weathering are essential for studying the effects of this process on meteorite samples, but the problem is that the time spent to reproduce space weathering in these experiments is billions of...

ABSTRACT In 2018 December, the main-belt asteroid (6478) Gault was reported to display activity. Gault is an asteroid belonging to the Phocaea dynamical family and was not previously known to be active, nor was any other member of the Phocaea family. In this work, we present the results of photometric and spectroscopic observations that...