The application of CCD photometry to monitoring the light variations of very small asteroids has led to an explosion of data available, and perhaps as importantly, has made it possible to probe fainter, and hence smaller asteroids. In this paper, we review several new results from the analysis of such lightcurve data, much of it taken by the late W. Z. Wisniewski, a native of Poland who studied at Poznan University (Wisniewski et al., 1997).At the time of the last close pass of the asteroid 4179 Toutatis by the Earth in 1992, it became apparent from radar observations that the asteroid was in a bizarre rotation state, and that the rotation rate was extremely slow. Harris (1994), re-evaluating the work by Burns and Safronov (1973) found that very small and slowly rotating asteroids can have a time scale of damping into a principal-axis rotation state which is long compared to their expected collisional lifetime, or for that matter, the age of the solar system:
Non-principal axis rotation in binary asteroid systems and how it weakens the BYORP effect
