Using Gaia spectrophotometric data for the purposes of asteroid taxonomy

Abstract

A new asteroid taxonomy will be an important result of Gaia observations of Solar System objects. Since Gaia observes asteroids in observing conditions and in an interval of wavelength which are slightly different with respect to normal ground-based observations, a dedicated observing campaign has been carried out at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in La Palma (Canary Islands, Spain). The obtained spectra have been used to generate a large number of synthetic clones, each one having slight changes with respect to its parent spectrum. These synthetic spectra are then used to feed the algorithm of taxonomic classification developed to reduce Gaia asteroid spectra. Processing of these data is in progress.