Related papers: Observing Near Earth Asteroids with a Small Telesc…
The study of small ($<$300 m) near-Earth objects (NEOs) is important because they are more closely related than larger objects to the precursors of meteorites that fall on Earth. Collisions of these bodies with Earth are also more frequent.…
The Canada-France-Hawaii Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) comprising about 25 000 MegaCam images was data mined to search for serendipitous encounters of known Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). A total of 143…
Here we explore a technique for constraining physical properties of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) based on variability in thermal emission as a function of viewing aspect. We present case studies of the low albedo, near-Earth asteroids…
Only a very small fraction of the asteroid population at size scales comparable to the object that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia has been discovered to date, and physical properties are poorly characterized. We present previously…
We consider a network of telescopes capable of scanning all the observable sky each night and targeting Near-Earth objects (NEOs) in the size range of the Tunguska-like asteroids, from 160 m down to 10 m. We measure the performance of this…
The Yarkovsky effect is a thermal process acting upon the orbits of small celestial bodies, which can cause these orbits to slowly expand or contract with time. The effect is subtle (da/dt ~ 10^-4 au/My for a 1 km diameter object) and is…
The observation of celestial objects is a fundamental activity in astronomy. Ground-based and space telescopes are used to gather electromagnetic radiation from space, allowing astronomers to study a wide range of celestial objects and…
The number of binary asteroids in the near-Earth region might be significantly higher than expected. While Bottke and Melosh (1996) suggested that about 15% of the NEAs are binaries, as indicated from the frequency of double craters, and…
Possible connections between the physical properties of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) and their orbital evolution were explored, with emphasis on binary asteroids. Our main starting hypothesis, suggested from the observations, was that the NEA…
Asteroids colliding with planets vary in composition and taxonomical type. Among Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are the V-types, basaltic asteroids that are classified via spectroscopic observations. In this work, we study the probability of…
Microarcsecond (uas) astrometry is an indispensable technique to detect earth-like exoplanets, fully characterize exoplanetary orbits, and measure their masses --information critical for assessing their habitability. Highly accurate…
We consider synchronized trains of sub-picosecond pulses generated by mode-locked lasers applied to deflection of near Earth objects (NEO) on collision course with Earth. Our method is designed to avoid a predicted collision of the NEO with…
Adaptive optics, large primary mirrors, and careful selection of target stars are the keys to ground-based imaging of extrasolar planets. Our near-IR survey is capable of identifying exoplanets of 1-10 M${_J}$ within 100 AU of young (t$<$60…
A simulation of de-biased population of NEAs is presented. The numerical integration of modeled orbits reveals geometrical conditions of close approaching NEAs to the Earth. The population with the absolute magnitude up to H=28 is simulated…
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…
The GBOT group is in charge of the Ground Based Optical Tracking of the Gaia satellite. In concrete terms, since the launch of Gaia, our task is to take every night, using ground based medium-class telescopes, short sequences of $10$ or…
Context: The measurement of the Yarkovsky effect on near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) is common practice in orbit determination today, and the number of detections will increase with the developments of new and more accurate telescopic surveys.…
The release of Gaia catalog is revolutionary to the astronomy of solar system objects. After some effects such as atmospheric refraction and CCD geometric distortion have been taken into account, the astrometric precision for ground-based…
Asteroids can be considered as sources of contamination of point sources and also sources of confusion noise, depending whether their presence is detected in the image or their flux is under the detection limit. We estimate that at low…
We perform high fidelity simulations of a wide-field telescopic survey searching for Near-Earth Objects (NEO) larger than 140\,m, focusing on the observational and detection model, detection efficiency and accuracy. As a test survey we…