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Published July 2019 | Submitted
Journal Article Open

Towards Efficient Detection of Small Near-Earth Asteroids Using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)

Abstract

We describe ZStreak, a semi-real-time pipeline specialized in detecting small, fast-moving, near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), which is currently operating on the data from the newly commissioned Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) survey. Based on a prototype originally developed by Waszczak et al. (2017) for the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF), the predecessor of ZTF, ZStreak features an improved machine-learning model that can cope with the 10× data rate increment between PTF and ZTF. Since its first discovery on 2018 February 5 (2018 CL), ZTF/ZStreak has discovered 45 confirmed new NEAs over a total of 232 observable nights until 2018 December 31. Most of the discoveries are small NEAs, with diameters less than ~100 m. By analyzing the discovery circumstances, we find that objects having the first to last detection time interval under 2 hr are at risk of being lost. We will further improve real-time follow-up capabilities, and work on suppressing false positives using deep learning.

Additional Information

© 2019 The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Received 2019 February 20; accepted 2019 April 19; published 2019 May 23. We thank the anonymous referee for helpful comments. We extend our thanks to many professional and amateur astronomers around the world for their valuable and timely follow-up observations which are critical for FMO discoveries. We thank Bill Gray in particular for his find_orb and sat_id software, which has been very useful to our work. We also thank Eric Christensen, Davide Farnocchia and Gareth Williams for beneficial discussions. Q.-Z. Ye acknowledges support by the GROWTH (Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen) project funded by the National Science Foundation PIRE (Partnership in International Research and Education) program under Grant No 1545949. Q.-Z. Ye is grateful for the Spacewatch FMO Project which sparked his interest in asteroids. C.-C. Ngeow thanks the funding from Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan) under grant 104-2923-M-008-004-MY5. Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. AST-1440341 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW. This research has made use of data and/or services provided by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. The National Geographic Society - Palomar Observatory Sky Atlas (POSS-I) image of 107P/(4015) Wilson-Harrington presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. POSS-I was made by the California Institute of Technology with grants from the National Geographic Society. Facility: PO:1.2m. - Software: Scikit-learn (Pedregosa et al. 2012).

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Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023