Study of Main-Belt and Near-Earth Asteroids with TRAPPIST and larger telescopes

Asteroids are metallic, rocky and/or icy objects, ranging in size from a few
meters to a few hundreds of kilometers. Their physical nature, distribution,
formation, and evolution are fundamental in understanding how the solar
system formed and evolved. In the present day solar system, they are -
along comets and trans-Neptunian objects - the most direct remnants of the
original building blocks that formed the terrestrial planets and the solid cores
of the giant planets. As such, they contain a relatively pristine record of the
initial conditions that existed in the solar nebula some 4.6 Gyrs ago. The
asteroids that have survived since that epoch, however, have experienced
numerous collisional, dynamical, and thermal events that have shaped their
present-day physical and orbital properties. Interpreting this record via
observations, laboratory studies, and theoretical/numerical modeling can tell
us much about the primordial state of these bodies and how they have
evolved thereafter.
In this context, the goal of the present research project is to contribute to
these efforts, both on the observational and modeling point of view. We
propose to use the robotic telescopes TRAPPIST-South and –North from
the Liège University to carry out regular and dense photometric
observations of large MBAs and small NEAs in the framework of two
international collaborations. Mostly our TRAPPIST observations will allow to
obtain many precise lightcurves to derive the asteroids rotation periods and
compute their 3D convex shape models that are needed for their detailed
characterization. In the framework of these two collaborations we will be
involved in the data reduction and analysis of (1) ESO VLT disk resolved
AO observations of a couple of large MBAs in order to derive their precise
volume and densities and (2) of the polarimetric observations of a couple of
NEAs in order to derive information about their surface properties.