MP3C, Minor Planet Physical Properties Catalogue (mp3c.oca.eu) a web portal allowing the easy access to a variety of physical properties, such as albedo, colors, sizes, rotation periods, of asteroids obtained from different sources or different databases : mp3c.oca.eu.
In the last few years, we witnessed a large growth in the number of asteroids for which we have physical properties. However, these data are dispersed in a multiplicity of catalogs. Extracting data and combining them for further analysis requires custom tools, a situation further complicated by the variety of data sources, some of them standardized (Planetary Data System) others not. MP3C is the answer to the issue above.
MP3C is a Virtual Observatory (OV) service that allows the user to access selected properties of asteroids by easy SQL query. At present, such diverse data as orbital parameters, photometric and light curve parameters, sizes and albedos derived by IRAS, AKARI and WISE, SDSS colors, SMASS taxonomy, family membership, satellite data, stellar occultation results, are included. Other data sources will be added in the near future. The physical properties output of the MP3C can be tuned by the users by query criteria based upon ranges of values of the ingested quantities. The resulting list of object can be used for interactive plots through standard VO tools such as TOPCAT. Also, their ephemerides and visibilities from given sites can be computed. We are targeting full VO compliance for providing a new standardized service to the community.
The distribution of albedos (color palette) in the double asteroid family Nysa-Polana
Shapes of asteroids determined by lightcurve inversion (from the DAMIT)
The service MP3C has been developed by Marco Delbo and Paolo Tanga, astronomers at OCA. It was implemented by Jérôme Gerakis engineer at OCA, and is part of the Virtual Observatory services of OCA (Head, Eric Slezak).
