Presently, the number of known asteroids is more than 710,000. Knowledge of size and albedo is essential in many aspects of asteroid research, such as the chemical composition and mineralogy, the size-frequency distribution of dynamical families, and the relationship between small bodies in the outer solar system or comets. Recently, based on the infrared all-sky survey data obtained by IRAS, AKARI, and WISE, the large asteroid catalogs containing size and albedo data have been constructed. In this paper, we discuss the compositional distribution in the main belt regions based on the compiled data on size, albedo, and separately obtained taxonomic type information.
We constructed an unbiased asteroid catalog from the mid-infrared part of the All-Sky Survey with the Infrared Camera (IRC) on board AKARI. About 20% of the point source events recorded in the IRC All-Sky Survey observations were not used for the IRC Point Source Catalog in its production process because of a lack of multiple detection by position. Asteroids, which are moving objects on the celestial sphere, are included in these "residual events" We identified asteroids out of the residual events by matching them with the positions of known asteroids. For the identified asteroids, we calculated the size and albedo based on the Standard Thermal Model. Finally we had a new brand of asteroid catalog, which contains 5,120 objects, about twice as many as the IRAS asteroid catalog.
ASTRO-F /FIS will carry out all sky survey in the wavelength from 50 to 200 μm. At far infrared, stars and galaxies may not be good calibration sources because the IR fluxes could be sensitive to the dust shell of stars and star formation activities of galaxies. On the other hand, asteroids could be good calibration sources at far infrared because of rather simple spectral energy distribution. Recent progresses in thermal models for asteroids enable us to calculate the far infrared flux fairly accurately. We have derived the Bond albedos and diameters for 559 asteroids based on the IRAS and ground based optical data. Using these thermal parameters and standard thermal model, we have calculated the spectral energy distributions of asteroids from 10 to 200 μm. We have found that more than 70% of our sample asteroids have flux errors less than 10% within the context of the best fitting thermal models. In order to assess flux uncertainties due to model parameters, we have computed SEDs by varing external parameters such as emissivity, beaming parameter and phase integral. We have found that about 100 asteroids can be modeled to be better than 5.8% of flux uncertainties. The systematic effects due to uncertainties in phase integral are not so important.