TANGA , Paolo

The determination of bulk physical properties for the largest possible number of asteroids which will be observed by Gaia is an important task which can be made easier by performing some dedicated groundbased observing campaigns. The proposed actions, consisting of applications of different observing techniques, primarily photometry and...

The observers in a ground-based network for Gaia support need to be aware of the properties of Gaia data for being able to exploit the information which is provided by the data processing chain. The case of Solar System objects is introduced, along with the potential of scientific exploitation. It is expected that Gaia will mainly contribute in...

Recent works have shown that the thermal inertia of km-sized near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) is more than two orders of magnitude higher than that of main belt asteroids (MBAs) with sizes (diameters) between 200 and 1,000 km. This confirms the idea that large MBAs, over hundreds millions of years,have developed a fine and thick thermally insulating...

International audience

The Gaia ESA space mission has started to provide its harvest with the first Gaia data release DR1, published in September 2016. Gaia DR1 provides positions for about 1 billion stars and proper motion for the Tycho-Gaia TGAS of 2 million stars with unprecedented accuracy. The second data release DR2 will be the major step in the Gaia mission,...

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The Gaia mission will operate over five years, nominally starting from 2011. Several tens of accurate astrometric and photometric measurements of each of the Solar System bodies will be available. In this work we focus on the specific case of the moons of Mars, whose positions will be known with an uncertainty better than 0.05 mas, never...

We will discuss some specific applications to the rotation state and the shapes of moderately large asteroids, and techniques of observations putting some emphasis on the HST/FGS instrument.

Multiple sources of evidence suggest that asteroids ranging from hundreds meters to few kilometers in size are rubble piles, i.e. gravitational aggregates of loosely consolidated material. However, no direct data on their internal structure is available to date. Cohesion between rubble-pile building blocks has been invoked in the past to...

The Gaia satellite, planned for launch by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, is the next generation astrometry mission following Hipparcos. While mapping the whole sky, the Gaia space mission is expected to discover thousands of Solar System Objects. These will include Near-Earth Asteroids and objects at Solar elongations as low as 45...