Dozens of virtual impactor orbits eliminated by the EURONEAR VIMP DECam data mining project

Abstract

Massive data mining of image archives observed with large etendue facilities represents a great opportunity for orbital amelioration of poorly known virtual impactor asteroids (VIs). There are more than 1000 VIs known today; most of them have very short observed arcs and many are considered lost as they became extremely faint soon after discovery. We aim to improve the orbits of VIs and eliminate their status by data mining the existing image archives. Within the European Near Earth Asteroids Research (EURONEAR) project, we developed the Virtual Impactor search using Mega-Precovery (VIMP) software endowed with a very effective (fast and accurate) algorithm to predict apparitions of candidate pairs for subsequent guided human search. Considering a simple geometric model, the VIMP algorithm searches for any possible intersection in space and time between the positional uncertainty of any VI and the bounding sky projection of any image archive. We applied VIMP to mine the data of 451914 Blanco/DECam images observed between 12 Sep 2012 and 11 Jul 2019, identifying 212 VIs that possibly fall into 1286 candidate images leading to either precovery or recovery events. Following a careful search of candidate images, we recovered and measured 54 VIs in 183 DECam images. About 4000 impact orbits were eliminated from both lists, 27 VIs were removed from at least one list, while 14 objects were eliminated from both lists. The faintest detections were around V~24.0, while the majority fall between 21<V<23. The minimal orbital intersection distances remains constant for 67% detections, increasing for eight objects and decreasing for 10 objects. Most eliminated VIs had short initial arcs of less than 5 days. Some unexpected photometric discovery has emerged regarding the rotation period of 2018 DB, based on the close inspection of longer trailed VIs and the measurement of their fluxes along the trails.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics (27 July 2020)

References in corpus (16)

• The Dark Energy Survey: more than dark energy - an overview
• SSOS: A Moving Object Image Search Tool for Asteroid Precovery
• Taxonomic classification of asteroids based on MOVIS near-infrared colors
• Astrometric calibration and performance of the Dark Energy Camera
• Near-infrared colors of minor planets recovered from VISTA - VHS survey (MOVIS)
• Fast algorithms for slow moving asteroids: constraints on the distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects
• Observation of Two New L4 Neptune Trojans in the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Fields
• The size distribution of Near Earth Objects larger than 10 meters
• Precovery of near-Earth asteroids by a citizen-science project of the Spanish Virtual Observatory
• Mining the Kilo-Degree Survey for solar system objects
• Mining the ESO WFI and INT WFC archives for known Near Earth Asteroids. Mega-Precovery software
• EURONEAR - Data Mining of Asteroids and Near Earth Asteroids
• Data mining of near Earth asteroids in the Subaru Suprime-Cam archive
• Mining the CFHT Legacy Survey for known Near Earth Asteroids
• Identification of asteroids using the Virtual Observatory: the WFCAM Transit Survey
• Mega-Archive and the EURONEAR Tools for Datamining World Astronomical Images

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Hubble Asteroid Hunter: I. Identifying asteroid trails in Hubble Space Telescope images
• Discovery and physical characterization as the first response to a potential asteroid collision: The case of 2023 DZ2