Mining the CFHT Legacy Survey for known Near Earth Asteroids

TL;DR

This study mined the CFHTLS dataset to identify and analyze known Near Earth Asteroids, improving their orbital data and potential hazard assessments through extensive recovery and precovery observations.

Contribution

It is the first large-scale data mining of CFHTLS images to recover and precover known NEAs and PHAs, enhancing their orbital information and impact risk evaluation.

Findings

Recovered 143 asteroids, including 27 precoveries.

Extended orbital arcs for 41 asteroids, improving orbit accuracy.

Refined orbits and MOID for hazard assessment.

Abstract

The Canada-France-Hawaii Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) comprising about 25 000 MegaCam images was data mined to search for serendipitous encounters of known Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). A total of 143 asteroids (109 NEAs and 34 PHAs) were found on 508 candidate images which were field corrected and measured carefully, and their astrometry was reported to Minor Planet Centre. Both recoveries and precoveries (apparitions before discovery) were reported, including data for 27 precovered asteroids (20 NEAs and 7 PHAs) and 116 recovered asteroids (89 NEAs and 27 PHAs). Our data prolonged arcs for 41 orbits at first or last opposition, refined 35 orbits by fitting data taken at one new opposition, recovered 6 NEAs at their second opposition and allowed us to ameliorate most orbits and their Minimal Orbital Intersection Distance (MOID), an important parameter to monitor for potential Earth impact hazard in the future.