Tuesday

The Solar System’s planetesimals make up only a tiny fraction of the planetary mass. But due in large part to the many on-going telescopic surveys designed to track and catalog these bodies, the small bodies, such as the asteroids, comets, and Kuiper Belt Objects exhibit a shear variety of physical properties at least as rich as the planets. Within these populations we find binaries and trinary systems, warm bodies with perplexing water-ice reservoirs, bodies exhibiting cometary activity that shouldn’t, spontaneous outbursting objects, and a range of shapes from circular to extremely irregular. Often the scientific insights afforded by these objects are invaluable unlocking key details of their origins and our cosmogony. The LSST will increase the known inventory of small bodies by a factor of 5 to 10, from which a massive number of these so-called oddballs will be detected. In this talk I will go over some of the odd planetesimals we are finding with current surveys, and what we might expect from the LSST. I will then go over the broad range of telescope facilities and observations that will be required to try and understand these objects within the framework of the full planetesimal populations and the Solar System as a whole.