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

TL;DR

This paper describes the mining of large astronomical archives to identify and recover known Near Earth Asteroids, improving their orbital data and introducing Mega-Precovery, a new data mining service for multiple archives.

Contribution

It presents the PRECOVERY software for asteroid identification in archives and introduces Mega-Precovery, a comprehensive online tool for multi-archive data mining.

Findings

152 asteroids identified in archival images

Prolonged orbital arcs for 18 precovered objects

Mega-Precovery consolidates 2.5 million images from 28 archives

Abstract

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.