AcuA: the AKARI/IRC Mid-infrared Asteroid Survey

TL;DR

This paper presents AcuA, a comprehensive mid-infrared asteroid catalog derived from AKARI satellite data, identifying and characterizing over 5,000 asteroids, including main belt, near-Earth, and Trojan objects.

Contribution

The study introduces a new asteroid catalog from AKARI data, significantly expanding the known asteroid dataset with size and albedo estimates for over 5,000 objects.

Findings

Catalog contains 5,120 asteroids, nearly double the IRAS catalog.

Includes diverse asteroid types: main belt, near-Earth, and Trojans.

Provides publicly accessible asteroid data with size and albedo estimates.

Abstract

We present the results of an unbiased asteroid survey in the mid-infrared wavelength with the Infrared Camera (IRC) onboard the Japanese infrared satellite AKARI. About 20% of the point source events recorded in the AKARI All-Sky Survey observations are not used for the IRC Point Source Catalog (IRC-PSC) in its production process because of the lack of multiple detection by position. Asteroids, which are moving objects on the celestial sphere, remain in these "residual events". We identify asteroids out of the residual events by matching them with the positions of known asteroids. For the identified asteroids, we calculate the size and albedo based on the Standard Thermal Model. Finally we have a brand-new catalog of asteroids, named the Asteroid Catalog Using Akari (AcuA), which contains 5,120 objects, about twice as many as the IRAS asteroid catalog. The catalog objects comprise 4,953 main belt asteroids, 58 near Earth asteroids, and 109 Jovian Trojan asteroids. The catalog will be publicly available via the Internet.