NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will conduct a close flyby of the cold classical Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) designated (486958) 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019. At a heliocentric distance of 44 AU, "MU69" will be the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. To enable this flyby, we have developed an extremely high precision orbit fitting and uncertainty processing pipeline, making maximal use of the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and pre-release versions of the ESA Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) catalog. This pipeline also enabled successful predictions of a stellar occultation by MU69 in July 2017. We describe how we process the WFC3 images to match the Gaia DR2 catalog, extract positional uncertainties for this extremely faint target (typically 140 photons per WFC3 exposure), and translate those uncertainties into probability distribution functions for MU69 at any given time. We also describe how we use these uncertainties to guide New Horizons, plan stellar occultions of MU69, and derive MU69's orbital evolution and long-term stability.
@article{arxiv.1805.02252,
title = {High-Precision Orbit Fitting and Uncertainty Analysis of (486958) 2014 MU69},
author = {Simon B. Porter and Marc W. Buie and Alex H. Parker and John R. Spencer and Susan Benecchi and Paolo Tanga and Anne Verbiscer and J. J. Kavelaars and Stephen D. J. Gwyn and Eliot F. Young and H. A. Weaver and Catherine B. Olkin and Joel W. Parker and Alan Stern},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.02252},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
(18 pages; 3 figures; 3 tables; Accepted for publication in AJ)