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Description
Because the second reaction wheel failed, a new mission was conceived for the otherwise healthy Kepler space telescope. In the course of the K2 mission, the telescope is staring at the plane of the Ecliptic. Thousands of solar system bodies therefore cross the K2 fields and usually cause additional noise in the highly accurate photometric data. We here follow the principle that some person's noise is another person's signal and investigate the possibility of deriving continuous asteroid light curves. This is the first such endeavor. In general, we are interested in the photometric precision that the K2 mission can deliver on moving solar system bodies. In particular, we investigate space photometric optical light curves of main-belt asteroids. We studied the K2 superstamps that cover the fields of M35, and Neptune together with Nereid, which were observed in the long-cadence mode (29.4min sampling). Asteroid light curves were generated by applying elongated apertures. We used the Lomb-Scargle method to determine periodicities that are due to rotation.
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