Near-Earth Asteroids Orbit Propagation with Gaia Observations

David Bancelin (1) , Daniel Hestroffer (1) , William Thuillot (1)

1 IMCCE - Institut de Mécanique Céleste et de Calcul des Ephémérides

Gaia is an astrometric mission that will be launched in 2013 and set on L2 point of Lagrange. It will observe a large number of Solar System Objects (SSO) down to magnitude 20. The Solar System Science goal is to map thousands of Main Belt Asteroids (MBAs), Near Earth Objects (NEOs) (including comets) and also planetary satellites with the principal purpose of orbital determination (better than 5 mas astrometric precision), determination of asteroid mass, spin properties and taxonomy. Besides, Gaia will be able to discover a few objects, in particular NEOs in the region down to the solar elongation 45° which are harder to detect with current ground-based surveys. But Gaia is not a follow-up mission and newly discovered objects can be lost if no ground-based recovery is processed. The purpose of this study is to quantify the impact of Gaia data for the known NEAs population and to show how to handle the problem of these discoveries when faint number of observations and thus very short arc is provided.

Domaines: Planétologie et astrophysique de la terre [astro-ph.EP]; Planétologie et astrophysique de la terre [astro-ph.EP]

David Bancelin, Daniel Hestroffer, William Thuillot. Near-Earth Asteroids Orbit Propagation with Gaia Observations. GAIA-FUN-SSO 2012: Second "Gaia Follow-up Network for Solar System Objects", Workshop held at IMCCE / Paris Observatory, 2012, September 19 - 21, Sep 2012, France. pp. 51-56. ⟨hal-00836279⟩