Spectrophotometric Studies of Near-Earth and Main-Belt Asteroids

Abstract

The reflectance spectra of five near-Earth asteroids, one Mars crosser, and four classical asteroids of the main belt in the range 0.35–0.95 µm have been observed, calculated, and analyzed. Asteroids with a magnitude up to 17 were observed in 2013–2017 with a 2-m telescope with a CCD spectrograph with extremely low spectral resolution (R ∼ 100) of the Terskol Observatory of the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences in order to determine their taxonomic types and composition. These results show that the composition of some of the studied near-Earth asteroids is heterogeneous judging by the variations in their reflectance spectra within adjacent taxonomic classes. It is notable that some of these asteroids are binary. The physical and chemical-mineralogical interpretation of reflectance spectra is presented.