Studying Near Earth Asteroids in the context of the European Project Neorocks: a focus on the Binary Asteroid Didymos, the Target of the DART/HERA Missions

Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids and comets whose trajectory can pass within 1.3 AU of the Sun. (65803) Didymos is a binary asteroid, whose moon (Dimorphos) was struck by the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft. The DART is a planetary defense demonstration mission by NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) to prove the effectiveness of the kinetic impactor technique in the event of a small asteroid approaching Earth. Following the impact, the revolution period of Dimorphos is 11.372 ± 0.017 (3σ) hours, with a period variation of -33.0 ± 1.0 (3σ) minutes. In this study, I conducted spectroscopic analysis of the Didymos system after the DART impact between 18th October 2022 and 27th December 2022, using spectra obtained by the Copernico and Galileo Telescopes located at the Astronomical Observatory of Asiago. The Didymos system is classified as S-type according to the Bus and DeMeo taxonomy. No variation in the spectral slope of the spectra was found during a full rotation of Didymos system approximately 19 days after the impact of DART. Additionally, I present the analysis of 49 NEOs collected by the Asiago telescope between December 2019 and March 2024 for the NEOROCKs project. The NEOs were taxonomically classified according to the Bus and DeMeo and Mahkle taxonomies. My results were compared with various works in the literature.