Description
We derive the thermal inertia of 2008 EV5, the baseline target for the Marco Polo-R mission proposal, and infer information about the size of the particles on its surface. Values of thermal inertia were obtained by fitting an asteroid thermophysical model to NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) infrared data. Grain size was derived from the constrained thermal inertia and a model of heat conductivity that accounts for different values of the packing fraction (a measure of the degree of compaction of the regolith particles).
|