Related papers: Short arc orbit determination and imminent impacto…
We describe systematic ranging, an orbit determination technique especially suitable to assess the near-term Earth impact hazard posed by newly discovered asteroids. For these late warning cases, the time interval covered by the…
The interest in the problem of small asteroids observed shortly before a deep close approach or an impact with the Earth has grown a lot in recent years. Since the observational dataset of such objects is very limited, they deserve…
Accurate measurements of osculating orbital elements are essential in order to understand and model the complex dynamic behavior of Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs). ESA's Gaia mission promises to have great potential in this respect. In this…
When new objects are detected in the sky, an orbit determination needs to be performed immediately to find out their origin, to determine the probability of an Earth impact and possibly also to estimate the impact region on Earth. ESA's…
In this article, theory-based analytical methodologies of astrophysics employed in the modern era are suitably operated alongside a test research-grade telescope to image and determine the orbit of a near-earth asteroid from original…
The Gaia Data Release 1 (GDR1) is a first, important step on the path of evolution of astrometric accuracy towards a much improved situation. Although asteroids are not present in GDR1, this intermediate release already impacts asteroid…
Context. We report the exploitation of a sample of epoch astrometry for 157 000 asteroids, the same object in the Gaia Data Release 3, extended over the time coverage planned for the Gaia DR4, which is not expected before the end of 2025.…
When an asteroid has a few observations over a short time span the information contained in the observational arc could be so little that a full orbit determination may be not possible. One of the methods developed in recent years to…
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 Objets (SSO) down to magnitude 20. The Solar System Science goal is to map thousand of Main Belt…
In the domain of Space Situational Awareness (SSA), the challenges pertaining to orbit determination and catalog correlation are notably pronounced, partly attributable to the escalating presence of non-cooperative satellites engaging in…
We study the evolution of the Earth collision probability of asteroid 2008 TC3 using a short observational arc and small numbers of observations. To assess impact probability, we use techniques that rely on the orbital-element probability…
The Gaia mission started its regular observing program in the summer of 2014, and since then it is regularly obtaining observations of asteroids. This paper draws the outline of the data processing for Solar System objects, and in…
Since July 2014, the ESA Gaia mission has been surveying the entire sky down to magnitude 20.7 in the visible. In addition to the millions of stars, thousands of Solar System Objects (SSOs) are observed daily. By comparing their positions…
We propose an adaptation of the semilinear algorithm for the prediction of the impact corridor on ground of an Earth-impacting asteroid. The proposed algorithm provides an efficient tool, able to reliably predict the impact regions at fixed…
In this paper we address the problem of computing a preliminary orbit of a celestial body from one topocentric position vector and a very short arc (VSA) of optical observations. Using the conservation laws of the two-body dynamics, we…
The computation of the Minimum Orbital Intersection Distance (MOID) is an old, but increasingly relevant problem. Fast and precise methods for MOID computation are needed to select potentially hazardous asteroids from a large catalogue. The…
Orbit-determination programs find the orbit solution that best fits a set of observations by minimizing the RMS of the residuals of the fit. For near-Earth asteroids, the uncertainty of the orbit solution may be compatible with trajectories…
We have performed a simulation of a next generation sky survey's (Pan-STARRS 1) efficiency for detecting Earth-impacting asteroids. The steady-state sky-plane distribution of the impactors long before impact is concentrated towards small…
Near-Earth asteroid 2014 AA entered the Earth's atmosphere on 2014 January 2, only 21 hours after being discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey. In this paper we compute the trajectory of 2014 AA by combining the available optical astrometry,…
The Gaia satellite, planned for launch by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, is the next generation astrometry mission following Hipparcos. While mapping the whole sky, the Gaia space mission is expected to discover thousands of Solar…