• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.49.3-50
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• 2016

Deep Ecliptic Patrol of the Southern Sky (DEEP-South) observations have been conducted officially during the off-season for exoplanet search since October 2015. Most of the allocated time for DEEP-South is devoted to targeted photometry, Opposition Census (OC), of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) to increase the number of such objects with known physical properties. It is efficiently achieved by multiband, time series photometry. This Opposition Census (OC) mode target objects near their opposition, with km-sized PHAs in the early stage and goes down to sub-km objects. Continuous monitoring of the sky with KMTNet is optimized for spin characterization of various kinds of asteroids, including binaries, satellites, slow/fast- and non-principal axis-rotators, and hence is expected to facilitate the debiasing of previously reported lightcurve observations. We present the preliminary lightcurves of NEAs from year one of the DEEP-South with our long term plan.

• Bulletin of the Korean Space Science Society
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• 2007.04a
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• pp.37-37
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• 2007

• Current Industrial and Technological Trends in Aerospace
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.102-109
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• 2011

NEOs are comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into orbits that allow them to enter the Earth's neighborhood. When the NEOs with certain size impact in the Earth's surface, it could cause a serious disaster. However, the NEOs that are potentially the most hazardous because they can closely approach the Earth are also the objects that could bemost easily exploited for their raw materials. This paper presents the characteristics of NEOs and the technology trend of advanced countries on spacecraft missions to comets and asteroids.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.46 no.2
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• pp.62.1-62.1
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• 2021

Interstellar objects originate from other stellar systems. Thus, they contain information about the stellar systems that cannot be directly explored; the information includes the formation and evolution of the stellar systems and the possibility of life. The examples observed so far are 1l/Oumuamua in 2017 and 2l/Borisov in 2019. In this talk, we present the possibility of detecting interstellar objects using the Heliospheric Imagers designed for space weather research and forecasting by observing solar wind in interplanetary space between the Sun and Earth. Because interstellar objects are unpredictable events, the detection requires observations with wide coverage in spatial and long duration in temporal. The near-real time data availability is essential for follow-up observations to study their detailed properties and future rendezvous missions. Heliospheric Imagers provide day-side observations, inaccessible by traditional astronomical observations. This will dramatically increase the temporal and spatial coverage of observations and also the probability of detecting interstellar objects visiting our solar system, together with traditional astronomical observations. We demonstrate that this is the case. We have used data taken from Solar TErrestrial RElation Observatory (STEREO)/Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation (SECCHI) HI-1. HI-1 is off-pointed from the Sun direction by 14 degrees with 20 degrees of the field of view. Using images observed from 2007 to 2019, we have found a total of 223 small objects other than stars, galaxies, or planets, indicative of the potential capability to detect interstellar objects. The same method can be applied to the currently operating missions such as the Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter and also future L5 and L4 missions. Since the data can be analyzed in near-real time due to the space weather purposes, more detailed properties can be analyzed by follow-up observations in ground and space, and also future rendezvous missions. We discuss future possible rendezvous missions at the end of this talk.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.67.2-67.2
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• 2014

Comet nucleus is a solid body consisting of dark dust grains and ice. Cometary volatiles sublimate from subsurface layer by solar heating, leaving behind large dust grains on the surface. Eventually, the appearance could turn into asteroidal rather than cometary. It is, therefore, expected that there would be "dormant comets" in the list of known asteroids. Our research group has undertaken the research on the population of dormant comets. We applied a brand-new asteroidal catalog compiled from data garnered by three infrared astronomical observatories, AKARI, IRAS and WISE. We extracted objects which have comet-like orbits on the basis of their orbital properties (Tisserand parameters with respect to Jupiter, TJ, and aphelion distance, Q). We found that (1) there are a considerable number (>100) of asteroids in comet-like orbits, and (2) 80% of them have low albedo consistent with comets. This result suggest that these low albedo objects could be dormant comets. One unanticipated finding is that 20% of asteroids in comet-like orbit have high albedo similar to S-type asteroids. It is difficult to explain the population of S-type asteroids in comet-like orbits by the classical mechanics theory. We further found that these high-albedo objects are small (D < 2 km) bodies distributed in near-Earth space. We suggest that such high-albedo, small, near-Earth asteroids are susceptible to Yarkovsky effect and injected into comet-like orbits.

• Bulletin of the Korean Space Science Society
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• 2004.04a
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• pp.27-27
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• 2004

There are increasing number of optical sky surveys for time-series observations, aiming to discover either photometric variations(variable stars, microlensing, or transients) or astrometric variations(near-earth objects, trans-neptunian objects). Some surveys, including YSTAR, use a single filter in order to increase the survey efficiency. However, the traditional method of atmospheric extinction and standardization requires the measurement of source color in at least two passbands. (omitted)

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.51.2-51.2
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• 2018

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.

• International Journal of Aeronautical and Space Sciences
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.267-280
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• 2014

A spacecraft placed in an Earth-Moon L2 quasi-halo orbit can maintain constant communication between the Earth and the far side of the Moon. This quasi-halo orbit could be used to establish a lunar space station and serve as a gateway to explore the solar system. For a mission in an Earth-Moon L2 quasi-halo orbit, a spacecraft would have to be transferred from the Earth to the vicinity of the Earth-Moon L2 point, then inserted into the Earth-Moon L2 quasi-halo orbit. Unlike the near Earth case, this orbit is essentially very unstable due to mutually perturbing gravitational attractions by the Earth, the Moon and the Sun. In this paper, an insertion maneuver of a spacecraft into an Earth-Moon L2 quasi-halo orbit was investigated using the global optimization algorithm, including simulated annealing, genetic algorithm and pattern search method with collision avoidance taken into consideration. The result shows that the spacecraft can maintain its own position in the Earth-Moon L2 quasi-halo orbit and avoid collisions with threatening objects.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.41 no.1
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• pp.31.3-31.3
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• 2016

Exploring a universe with gravitational waves (GWs) was only theoretical expectation for long time. In September 2015, the Laser Interferometer GW Observatory (LIGO) first detected GWs emitted from the collision of two stellar-mass black holes in cosmological distance (1.3 billion light years) on Earth. This confirms the existence of black-hole binary mergers, and further, opens a new field of GW astronomy. We begin our discussion with a list of important GW sources that can be detectable on Earth by large-scale laser interferometers such as LIGO. Focusing on compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes, we then discuss possible research in the context of GW astronomy. By coordinating with existing observatories, searching for electromagnetic waves or particles from astronomical objects, around the world, multi-messenger astronomy for the universe's most cataclysmic phenomena (e.g. gamma-ray bursts) will be available in the near future.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.71.2-71.2
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• 2019

In order to gather clues to surface mineralogy of asteroids, we classify their taxonomy based on their reflected spectra. It is remarkable that a large number of asteroids plotted in the proper orbital element space with distinct colors according to their taxonomic types reveal the dynamical evolution and the structure in the near-Earth space, the main-belt and beyond. Although we have ~1×10⁶ known objects, no more than ~3×10³ of them are properly classified taxonomically as visible-near infrared spectroscopy is costly. On the other hand, multi-wavelength broadband photometry in the visible region provides a rather inexpensive alternative tool for approximate taxonomy. Thus we have conducted multi-band observations systematically using Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) with BVRI and griz filters since back in 2015. We then applied aperture photometry with elliptical apertures to fit the trails of objects during the exposures, and classified them with the principle component indices of Ivezic et al. (2001). We will make use of our new, three dimensional asteroid classification scheme for the next step.