Mining the ESO WFI and INT WFC archives for known Near Earth Asteroids. Mega-Precovery software

Vaduvescu, O.; Popescu, M.; Comsa, I.; Paraschiv, A.; Lacatus, D.; Sonka, A.; Tudorica, A.; Birlan, M.; Suciu, O.; Char, F.; Constantinescu, M.; Badescu, T.; Badea, M.; Vidican, D.; Opriseanu, C.
Bibliographical reference

Astronomische Nachrichten, Vol.334, Issue 7, p.718-728

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2013
Number of authors
15
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
12
Refereed citations
12
Description
The ESO/MPG WFI and the INT WFC wide field archives comprising 330 000 images were mined to search for serendipitous encounters of known Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). A total of 152 asteroids (44 PHAs and 108 other NEAs) were identified using the PRECOVERY software, their astrometry being measured on 761 images and sent to the Minor Planet Centre. Both recoveries and precoveries were reported, including prolonged orbital arcs for 18 precovered objects and 10 recoveries. We analyze all new opposition data by comparing the orbits fitted before and after including our contributions. We conclude the paper presenting "Mega-Precovery", a new online service focused on data mining of many instrument archives simultaneously for one or a few given asteroids. A total of 28 instrument archives have been made available for mining using this tool, adding together about 2.5 million images forming the "Mega-Archive". Using ESO/MPG WFI images served by the ESO Science Archive Facility and INT WFC images served by the CASU Astronomical Data Centre.
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Minor Bodies of the Solar System
This project studies the physical and compositional properties of the so-called minor bodies of the Solar System, that includes asteroids, icy objects, and comets. Of special interest are the trans-neptunian objects (TNOs), including those considered the most distant objects detected so far (Extreme-TNOs or ETNOs); the comets and the comet-asteroid
Julia de
León Cruz