Comparison of Deterministic Methods to Estimate Sidereal Rotation Period from Light Curves

Abstract

The importance of determining the sidereal rotation period of an astronomical object on future investigations pertaining to said object has been well documented in the literature. Researchers, however, have differed in their techniques used to estimate and model objects in the space catalog. In this paper, several period-estimation methods will be explored ranging across Fourier and phase-folding techniques. These methods will be tested using ground-based observations of light curve data for various resident space objects that fall under a rigid body context (i.e., asteroids, satellites, probes, rocket bodies) and celestial objects like stars and extrasolar planets. The effect of varying sample size, the inadequacies in unevenly sampled data processing, autonomy of the method, and complexity of parameters are investigated. For the models of artificial space objects that are not open source, a simulation is used to generate synthetic light curves with which all of the above-mentioned techniques are also employed. To account for heterogeneity in method parameters, each technique is tested with a range of values to optimize the rotational period. Results for uniformly sampled asteroid data as well as nonuniformly sampled stellar objects and generic sinusoidal data show variances in accuracy of the methods, but certain methods stand out.