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