Franck Marchis, UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute

Since the discovery of Ida’s companion Dactyl in 1993, the number of known multiple asteroids has been continuously increasing and ~165 of them are now known. Since 2003, Dr. Marchis and his colleagues have been conducting a large survey of these interesting and diverse populations using various ground-based telescopes and techniques, such as high angular resolution imaging, lightcurve photometry, and VIS/NIR spectroscopy, and also the Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes. Dr. Marchis ' talk will cover the latest insights into these multiple systems, such as the sizes and shapes of their components, their bulk-density and their orbital parameters, which are key to understanding how they formed and evolved.

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