ROSETTA TARGET ASTEROIDS

the scientific objective of this proposal is the set up of the physicochemical models of the rosetta mission possible target asteroids based on the observations from iso and groundbased telescopes r^ant to both the optimization of the mission scenario and the refinement design of the payload instruments. in particular the proposer intends i) to determine the compositional type of possible target asteroids to contribute to the best choice of the targets to be included in the actual mission, ii) to study the texture and the composition of the asteroid surface layers to infer some of their bulk physical and chemical properties; iii) to model the thermal behaviour of the target asteroids; iv) to use all the data concerning the studied asteroids to constrain the reference model of the selected target asteroids. the mid to farinfrared region contains a wealth of diagnostic spectral features but is basically unexploited in the study of asteroid surface composition. we propose to study the three most probable rosetta target asteroids (not yet defined at the time of the first call for iso proposal) by obtaining low resolution spectra in the range 245 microns. truncated!, Please see actual data for full text [truncated!, Please see actual data for full text]