Short arc orbit determination and imminent impactors in the Gaia era

Abstract

Short-arc orbit determination is crucial when an asteroid is first discovered. In these cases usually the observations are so few that the differential correction procedure may not converge. We have developed an initial orbit computation method, based on the systematic ranging, an orbit determination techniques which systematically explores a raster in the topocentric range and range-rate space region inside the admissible region. We obtain a fully rigorous computation of the probability for the asteroid that could impact the Earth within few days from the discovery, without any a priori assumption. We test our method on the two past impactors 2008 TC3 and 2014 AA, on some very well known cases, and on two particular objects observed by the ESA Gaia mission.

References in corpus (6)

• Gaia Data Release 1: Astrometry - one billion positions, two million proper motions and parallaxes
• The population of natural Earth satellites
• Star catalog position and proper motion corrections in asteroid astrometry
• Systematic ranging and late warning asteroid impacts
• Solar System Science with ESA Euclid
• The daily processing of asteroid observations by Gaia

Cited by in corpus (8)

• The digest2 NEO Classification Code
• Completeness of Impact Monitoring
• The Manifold Of Variations: hazard assessment for short-term impactors
• Use of the Semilinear Method to predict the Impact Corridor on Ground
• Potential asteroid discoveries by the ESA Gaia mission: Results from follow-up observations
• Identification of asteroids using the Virtual Observatory: the WFCAM Transit Survey
• Monitoring near-Earth-object discoveries for imminent impactors
• The Manifold Of Variations: impact location of short-term impactors