DEEP-South: A New Taxonomic Classification of Asteroids

Asteroid taxonomy dates back to the mid-1970's and is based mostly on broadband photometric and spectroscopic observations in the visible wavelength. Different taxonomic classes have long been characterized by spectral slope shortward of 0.75 microns and the absorption band in 1 micron, the principal components. In this way, taxonomic classes are grouped and divided into four broad complexes; silicates (S), carbonaceous (C), featureless (X), Vestoids (V), and the end-members that do not fit well within the S, C, X and V complexes. The past decade witnessed an explosion of data due to the advent of large-scale asteroid surveys such as SDSS. The classification scheme has recently been expanded with the analysis of the SDSS 4th Moving Object Catalog (MOC 4) data. However, the boundaries of each complex and subclass are rather ambiguously defined by hand. Furthermore, there are only few studies on asteroid taxonomy using Johnson-Cousins filters, and those were conducted on a small number of objects, with significant uncertainties. In this paper, we present our preliminary results for a new taxonomic classification of asteroids using SMASS, Bus and DeMeo (2014) and the SDSS MOC 4 datasets. This classification scheme is simply represented by a triplet of photometric colors, either in SDSS or in Johnson-Cousins photometric systems.