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Published October 2017 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

NEOWISE Reactivation Mission Year Three: Asteroid Diameters and Albedos

Abstract

The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) reactivation mission has completed its third year of surveying the sky in the thermal infrared for near-Earth asteroids and comets. NEOWISE collects simultaneous observations at 3.4 and 4.6 μm of solar system objects passing through its field of regard. These data allow for the determination of total thermal emission from bodies in the inner solar system, and thus the sizes of these objects. In this paper, we present thermal model fits of asteroid diameters for 170 NEOs and 6110 Main Belt asteroids (MBAs) detected during the third year of the survey, as well as the associated optical geometric albedos. We compare our results with previous thermal model results from NEOWISE for overlapping sample sets, as well as diameters determined through other independent methods, and find that our diameter measurements for NEOs agree to within 26% (1σ) of previously measured values. Diameters for the MBAs are within 17% (1σ). This brings the total number of unique near-Earth objects characterized by the NEOWISE survey to 541, surpassing the number observed during the fully cryogenic mission in 2010.

Additional Information

© 2017 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2017 July 8; revised 2017 August 29; accepted 2017 August 30; published 2017 September 29. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This publication also makes use of data products from NEOWISE, which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the Planetary Science Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research has made use of data and services provided by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. This publication uses data obtained from the NASA Planetary Data System (PDS). This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Based on observations obtained at the Gemini Observatory through a Gemini Large and Long Program, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), the National Research Council (Canada), CONICYT (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva (Argentina), and Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (Brazil). Finally, the authors acknowledge the efforts of NEO follow-up observers around the world who provide time-critical astrometric measurements of newly discovered NEOs, enabling object recovery and computation of orbital elements. Many of these efforts would not be possible without the financial support of the NASA Near-Earth Object Observations Program.

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Published - Masiero_2017_AJ_154_168.pdf

Submitted - 1708.09504.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 17, 2023