Mining the ESO WFI and INT WFC archives for known Near Earth Asteroids. Mega-Precovery software

Ovidiu Vaduvescu (1, 2, 3) , Marcel Popescu (1, 4, 5) , Iulia Comsa (6) , Alin Razvan Paraschiv (7, 8) , Daniela Adriana Lacatus (7, 8) , Adrian Sonka (5, 9) , Alexandru Tudorica (10, 11) , Mirel Birlan (1) , Oana Suciu (6, 12) , Farid Char (13) , Mona Constantinescu (5) , Toma Badescu (11, 14) , Mihaela Badea (10, 11, 14) , Dan Vidican (5) , Constantin Opriseanu (5)

1 IMCCE - Institut de Mécanique Céleste et de Calcul des Ephémérides
2 Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes
3 IAC - Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias
4 Faculty of Applied Sciences, Department of Physics
5 Bucharest Astroclub
6 Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics
7 Institute of Geodynamics "Sabba S. Stefanescu"
8 Research Center for Atomic Physics and Astrophysics, Faculty of Physics
9 Astronomical Observatory ”Admiral Vasile Urseanu”
10 BCGS - Bonn-Cologne Graduate School of Physics and Astronomy
11 AlfA - Argelander-Institut für Astronomie
12 SARM - The Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy
13 Unidad de Astronomia
14 University of Bucharest, Faculty of Physics

The ESO/MPG WFI and the INT WFC wide field archives comprising 330,000 images were mined to search for serendipitous encounters of known Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). A total of 152 asteroids (44 PHAs and 108 other NEAs) were identified using the PRECOVERY software, their astrometry being measured on 761 images and sent to the Minor Planet Centre. Both recoveries and precoveries were reported, including prolonged orbital arcs for 18 precovered objects and 10 recoveries. We analyze all new opposition data by comparing the orbits fitted before and after including our contributions. We conclude the paper presenting Mega-Precovery, a new online service focused on data mining of many instrument archives simultaneously for one or a few given asteroids. A total of 28 instrument archives have been made available for mining using this tool, adding together about 2.5 million images forming the Mega-Archive.

Mots clés: Orbital Amelioration; Minor Planets; Near Earth Asteroids; Data Mining; Image Archives

Domaines: Planétologie et astrophysique de la terre [astro-ph.EP]; Planétologie et astrophysique de la terre [astro-ph.EP]; Instrumentation et méthodes pour l'astrophysique [astro-ph.IM]; Instrumentation et méthodes pour l'astrophysique [astro-ph.IM]

Ovidiu Vaduvescu, Marcel Popescu, Iulia Comsa, Alin Razvan Paraschiv, Daniela Adriana Lacatus, et al.. Mining the ESO WFI and INT WFC archives for known Near Earth Asteroids. Mega-Precovery software. 2013. ⟨hal-00793182⟩