Broadly, it matches the composition patterns of the Inner Main Asteroid Belt (located at heliocentric distance between 2.2 and 2.5 astronomical units), which is the likely source region of these bodies. The team of astronomers found that the population of NEAs shows a large variety of objects in terms of physical and dynamical properties. The sizes of the asteroids are determined by their absolute magnitudes (the distribution of absolute magnitudes of the observed objects is shown in Figure 1) and by their surface properties (albedos), which can be inferred from spectroscopy. The goal of this collaborative work was to characterise spectroscopically a significant sample of NEAs with sizes in the range of 0.25-5.5 km (categorised as large). The students were invited to take part in the EURONEAR survey by carrying out the observations, and they were assisted remotely from the Astronomical Institute in Bucharest (Romania) by one of the principal investigators of the programme.

The ING studentship programme, aimed at providing hands-on training of 4-6 students per year, was at the core of this research.

In the framework of the EURONEAR collaboration, a group of astronomers performed a spectroscopic survey of NEAs using the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) equipped with the Intermediate Dispersion Spectrograph (IDS).

Isaac newton telescope