The importance of determining the sidereal rotation period of an astronomical object on future investigations pertaining to said object has been well documented in the literature. Researchers, however, have differed in their techniques used to estimate and model objects in the space catalog. In this paper, several period-estimation methods will be explored ranging across Fourier and phase-folding techniques. These methods will be tested using ground-based observations of light curve data for various resident space objects that fall under a rigid body context (i.e., asteroids, satellites, probes, rocket bodies) and celestial objects like stars and extrasolar planets. The effect of varying sample size, the inadequacies in unevenly sampled data processing, autonomy of the method, and complexity of parameters are investigated. For the models of artificial space objects that are not open source, a simulation is used to generate synthetic light curves with which all of the above-mentioned techniques are also employed. To account for heterogeneity in method parameters, each technique is tested with a range of values to optimize the rotational period. Results for uniformly sampled asteroid data as well as nonuniformly sampled stellar objects and generic sinusoidal data show variances in accuracy of the methods, but certain methods stand out.

确定天文物体的恒星自转周期对未来与所述物体有关的研究的重要性已在文献中得到充分证明。然而，研究人员在用于估计和建模空间目录中对象的技术方面有所不同。在本文中，将探讨跨越傅立叶和相位折叠技术的几种周期估计方法。这些方法将使用地面观测的光变曲线数据进行测试，这些数据适用于处于刚体环境下的各种常驻空间物体（即小行星、卫星、探测器、火箭体）以及恒星和太阳系外行星等天体。研究了不同样本量的影响、不均匀采样数据处理的不足、方法的自主性和参数的复杂性。对于非开源的人造空间物体模型，使用模拟生成合成光曲线，上述所有技术均采用该曲线。为了解决方法参数的异质性，每种技术都使用一系列值进行测试，以优化旋转周期。均匀采样的小行星数据以及非均匀采样的恒星物体和通用正弦数据的结果显示了方法准确性的差异，但某些方法很突出。