NASA's Kepler Space Telescope Captures Hundreds Of Asteroids

Kepler space telescope has another mission as it caught hundreds of asteroids while the researchers are working on the trans-Neptunian objects. They chose two extended mosaics that sheltered the open cluster M35 and the path of the planet Neptune and tracked all known asteroids crossing them using the Kepler space telescope.

The researchers from the Konkoly and Gothard hope that with Kepler, they could identify the rotation periods of the asteroids more accurately. Robert Szabo from Konkoly Observatory and the lead author of the study said that they gauge the paths of all known asteroids, but most of them turned out to be simply too faint for Kepler. He further said that the dense stellar background toward M35 further lessened the number of successful detection. They also must keep in mind that Kepler was never meant to do such studies. With this, perceiving four dozen asteroids with new rotation rates is already more than anybody expected.

In the other study, the researchers focused on 56 pre-selected Trojan asteroids in the middle of the L4 that orbits ahead of Jupiter. These could be monitored for 10 to 20 days. They discovered that several objects exhibited slow light variations between two and 15 days. They also see not just one rotating asteroid but two orbiting each other. This confirms that about 20 to 25 percent of Trojans are binary asteroids, according to Phys. Org.

On the other hand, Kepler did not see spinning Trojans asteroids. Szabo said that a large piece of rock can rotate much faster than a rubble pile or an icy body of the same size without breaking apart. He further said that their findings favor the scenario that Trojans arrived from the ice-dominated outer solar system instead of migrating outwards from the main asteroid belt.

Kepler is a space telescope launched by NASA on March 7, 2009. It aims to discover Earth-size exoplanets that orbit other stars in the Milky Way. It also gauges how many billions of stars in the Milky Way. It is named after astronomer Johannes Kepler.