Detection Efficiency of Asteroid Surveys

Abstract

A comprehensive characterization of the detection efficiency of nine of the major asteroid surveys that have been active over the past two decades is presented. The detection efficiency is estimated on a nightly basis by comparing the detected asteroids with the complete catalog of known asteroids propagated to the same observing epoch. Results include a nightly estimate of the detection efficiency curves as a function of apparent magnitude and apparent velocity of the asteroids, as well as a cumulative analysis to estimate the overall performance of each survey. The limiting magnitude distribution is estimated for each survey, and it is then modeled as a function of telescope aperture to obtain an estimate over a wide range of apertures.

Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, 7 pages, 7 figures

References in corpus (2)

• NEOWISE Observations of Near-Earth Objects: Preliminary Results
• Properties of the Trans-Neptunian Belt: Statistics From the CFHT Survey

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Debiased orbit and absolute-magnitude distributions for near-Earth objects
• The near-Earth asteroid population from two decades of observations
• Population control of Mars Trojans by the Yarkovsky & YORP effects