SolidRock

Our own Solar System is not representative of the thousands of known planetary systems (at the 0.1 % level). What processes and main events shaped it, triggering the formation of a terrestrial planet in the habitability zone and the apparition of life ? The first models of the formation and evolution of our Solar system were built to describe the properties of the planets (masses and orbits). In the 2000s, with the discovery of hundreds of thousands of asteroids, their dynamical properties (overall orbital distribution) became the main success-criteria to fulfill for models. However, numerous new models are now proposed and cannot be tested as the orbital distribution alone is not stringent enough. Two key elements miss to sort these models and understand the formation of our Solar System. First, an unbiased description of the dynamical and compositional distribution of current asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. Second, a detailed understanding of asteroids secular evolution. Indeed, each composition tracks a different origin (location in the accretion disk and epoch) whose implantation in the asteroid belt is different in the models. However, the currrent asteroid belt is the result of 4 billion years of collisional and dynamical evolution, bluring the pristine distribution of compositions. Both aspects can only be solved through a statistical study of the dynamical, physical, and surface properties of asteroids. Decades of targeted observations of asteroids have brought only a limited sample of objects with known composition and physical properties. There is, however, a tremendous amount of serendipitous observations of asteroids hidden in the archives of large sky surveys. Harvesting them allows to tackle these two main issues. My ERC-CoG SolidRock project aims at extracting these data (colors and ligthcurves) to build the reference catalogues of asteroid dynamical, physical, and surface properties, from which their dynamical and compositional structure will be determined. This will provide the keys to their origin and evolution. The present T-ERC projet focuses on a preliminary study of physical properties and multiplicity from the analysis of lightcurves extracted from sky surveys. Several meetings are also planned to work on the weaknesses of the ERC project.