Tyler Linder

Date of Award

January 2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Space Studies

First Advisor

Michael J. Gaffey

Abstract

Researchers have been categorizing asteroids by color for decades in an attempt to better understand asteroid composition and potential links to the meteorite population. However, only recently through large data collection surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has the asteroid population as a whole been studied. This research will look at a subset of asteroids with the highest reflectivity differences as reported by Carvano et al. (2010) in order to answer the question: Can visible wavelength ambiguous taxonomic asteroid types be an indicator of a non-homogeneous surface?

This research studied asteroid 2453 (Wabash) in great detailed with visible spectrophotometry and near-infrared spectra. The results show that although a minor non-homogeneous surface was identified the non-homogenous surface is the not the primary source of the SDSS detected taxonomic variation.

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