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Automating Asteroid Shape Modeling From Radar Images

Characterizing the shapes and spin states of near-Earth asteroids is essential both for trajectory predictions to rule out potential future Earth impacts and for planning spacecraft missions. But reconstructing objects’ shapes and spins from delay-Doppler data is a computationally intensive inversion problem. We implement a Bayesian optimization routine that uses SHAPE to autonomously search the space of spin-state parameters, yielding spin state constraints within a factor of 3 less computer runtime and minimal human supervision. These routines are now being incorporated into radar data processing pipelines at Arecibo.


Michael W. Busch, Agata Rozek, Sean Marshall, Grace Young, Adam Cobb, Chedy Raissi, Yarin Gal, Lance Benner, Shantanu Naidu, Marina Brozovic, Patrick Taylor
COSPAR (Committee on Space Research) Assembly, 2018
[Blog Post (Adam Cobb)] [BibTex]

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