| Abstract: | WISE has observed over 150,000 main-belt asteroids and approximately 1,000 near-Earth asteroids in its main cryogenic mission and its post-cryogenic extensions. Its photometric bandpasses encompass the wavelength regions in which asteroid spectra transition from being dominated by reflected sunlight (at shorter wavelengths) to thermal emission (at longer wavelengths). This immense multi-color -- and, in many cases, multi-epoch -- data set has spurred the development of increasingly sophisticated models that follow the interaction of incident sunlight with the asteroid surface and calculate the resulting reflected and thermally emitted fluxes. This presentation will review the underlying physics and computational approaches used in these models, their application to asteroids observed by WISE in efforts to constrain these objects' physical and surface properties, and the major results to date. The latter include accurate estimates of size as well as optical and near-infrared albedo for thousands of objects; and, for a growing number of individual asteroids, measurements of the surface thermal inertia, which in turn constrain the mean grain sizes of the surface regolith.
*The contents of this presentation represent the viewpoint of the author and not NASA policy.
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