LEARNING OUTCOMES
The student knows where and how to find astronomical literature. The student is able to read and understand scientific literature, and can summarise the contents of scientific articles. The student can discuss scientific articles with his/her colleagues. The student understands the major research topics and their interconnections in small-body research and can provide an in-depth summary of the current status of asteroid research.
CONTENT
The course starts with an introduction to asteroids and the history of asteroid research and proceeds to assess how remote observations yield information about asteroids. This part discusses, first, asteroid surveys, as well as numbers, orbits, biases, and size distributions of asteroids, and, second, physical properties such as sizes, shapes, spins, compositions, and thermophysical parameters of asteroids.
Thereafter, the discussion turns to dynamical, thermal, and collisional evolutionary processes affecting individual asteroids and groups of asteroids.
Towards the end of the course, we consider interrelations between asteroids and other types of bodies in the Solar System including a discussion of asteroid families, relation of asteroids to meteoroid streams, evolution of comets into asteroids, main-belt comets, as well as the origins of the various populations of asteroids.
