Polarimetric research on S- and Q-type Near-Earth Asteroids

Polarimetry is a powerful technique to investigate the physical properties of surface materials on airless bodies in the solar system. It is known that the degree of linear polarization changes as a function of the phase angle (the angle between Sun-target-Observer). Especially, the dependency of the polarization degree at large phase angle allows us to obtain information related to the particle size and porosity, which is difficult to be determined via other observation techniques (i.e., photometry and spectroscopy). However, despite the advantage, only a few asteroids were observed with polarimetric devices at large phase angles. Here, we present our new polarimetric research of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) observed at the large phase angles. Among the NEAs, we focus on S- and Q-type asteroids, which include: (331471) 1984 QY1, (90075) 2002 VU94, and (66391) 1999 KW4. The observation was conducted using the Pirka 1.6-m Telescope at the Nayoro Observatory of Hokkaido University at the phase angles ${\alpha}{\sim}100degree$, which provides us the maximum polarization degrees of these objects. Considering the observational results together with two objects ((1566) Icarus and (4179) Toutatis) in reference papers [1], [2], we will discuss the implication of the regolith size on their surfaces.