Project Advisors: Dr. Sarah Sonnett, Dr. George Chartas

Conducted research on the detection of the presence of hydrated minerals on C-type and S-type asteroids in the Hilda and Cybele clusters. For this project, I utilized Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs), Hanning smoothing functions, Gaussian fitting, and signal normalization techniques to turn raw standard star and asteroid data obtained from Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) telescopes into spectroscopic data with asteroid chemical signatures. Data was obtained using diffraction grating and spectrometer data in the infrared and visible wavelength regime. Additionally, I scheduled the observations by generating ephemerides using the JPL Small Body Database, local atmospheric conditions, asteroid tracker maps.

Asteroids to be observed were selected through a filtering process on the JPL Small Bodies database and nearby solar analog stars were selected through the SIMBAD database. Dark frames were taken first, followed by observations of planetary nebula, solar analog stars, and the asteroid targets. Asteroid and star images were taken using the SA-200 diffraction grating to obtain spectral data on the Rita Hollings Observatory telescope, with other data coming from collaborators at LCO telescopes in Australia and Hawaii.

Asteroid and star location within the frame was determined by planetary nebula observation. The zeroth and end of first order spectral pixel coordinates were calculated using circular regions to centroid them in DS9 software. Dark-subtracted images were rotated by the angle based on the location of the values from the centroiding process. This allowed us to properly align the spectrometer image data (the bright line), coming from the asteroid (bright dot in the circle).