Cellinoid shape model for Hipparcos data

Being intermediate between a regular triaxial ellipsoid shape and a more complex convex shape, the so-called “cellinoid” shape model consists of eight octants of eight ellipsoids with the constraint that neighbouring octants share two common axes. The resulting variety of possible shapes, obtained at the cost of only three extra parameters to be added to models of regular ellipsoids, can be employed to efficiently simulate asteroids with irregular shapes. This article shows how the cellinoid shape model can be applied to the inversion of sparse photometric data, such as Hipparcos data. In order to make the model more efficient and convenient to use, an error analysis is discussed and numerically confirmed. Finally, we determine physical parameters of several asteroids, including their shape, rotational period and pole orientation, by applying our model to Hipparcos data.