Asteroid Diameters and Albedos from NEOWISE Reactivation Mission Years Four and Five
Abstract
The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft has been conducting a two-band thermal infrared survey to detect and characterize asteroids and comets since its reactivation in Dec 2013. Using the observations collected during the fourth and fifth years of the survey, our automated pipeline detected candidate moving objects which were verified and reported to the Minor Planet Center. Using these detections, we perform thermal modeling of each object from the near-Earth object and Main Belt asteroid populations to constrain their sizes. We present thermal model fits of asteroid diameters for 189 NEOs and 5831 MBAs detected during the fourth year of the survey, and 185 NEOs and 5776 MBAs from the fifth year. To date, the NEOWISE Reactivation survey has provided thermal model characterization for 957 unique NEOs. Including all phases of the original WISE survey brings the total to 1473 unique NEOs that have been characterized between 2010 and the present.
Additional Information
The authors would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments that improved this manuscript. 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. The research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D004). 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 funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and operated by the California Institute of Technology. This research has made extensive use of the numpy, scipy, and matplotlib Python packages. Based on observations obtained at the Gemini Observatory, 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). The authors also acknowledge the efforts of worldwide NEO followup observers 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, for which we are grateful.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 103980
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200624-080903113
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- 80NM0018D004
- NASA
- Created
-
2020-06-24Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2023-06-02Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)