Rotation periods of asteroids serendipitously observed by the NASA/ Kepler K2 mission

Understanding the rotational periods of asteroids is crucial for gaining insights into their internal structures, compositions, and collisional histories. NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, during its K2 extension (2014-2018), serendipitously observed numerous asteroids while surveying the ecliptic plane, providing a unique photometric dataset. By analyzing photometric data from the K2 mission, we aimed to determine the rotational periods of asteroids that crossed Kepler 's field of view, focusing on objects with an apparent magnitude of 19 or brighter that appeared in the Kepler target pixel files at least ten times. We developed an algorithm to identify asteroid crossings in the Kepler data and extract photometric light curves. The Lomb-Scargle periodogram method was employed to determine the rotational periods from the extracted light curves due to its robustness in handling unevenly sampled data. Noise and systematic errors were mitigated through photometric corrections using co-trending basis vectors. We extracted and analyzed brightAsteroidsObserved light curves from brightAsteroids asteroids observed during the Kepler /K2 mission. This allowed us to compute rotation periods for PeriodsDetermined asteroids. We found that AsteroidsWithKnownPeriods of these asteroids had previously known periods. The rotation periods determined for of the asteroids in this study agree with existing asteroid rotation periods from the literature, validating our approach. We report new rotation periods and their light curve amplitudes for NewPeriods asteroids, expanding the catalog of known asteroid rotation periods. The analysis of rotation periods from the Kepler K2 mission data has provided valuable insights into the physical characteristics of main-belt asteroids. Our results are consistent with existing data and expand the catalog of known asteroid rotation periods. These findings contribute to our understanding of asteroid dynamics and will aid future research in planetary science and asteroid exploration.