Measuring the Distances to Asteroids from One Observatory in One Night with Upcoming All-Sky Telescopes
Maryann Benny Fernandes, Daniel Scolnic, Erik Peterson, Chengxing, Zhai, Tyler Linder, Maria Acevedo, and Daniel Reichart

TL;DR
This paper develops and tests a method to determine asteroid distances within a single night using Earth's rotation-induced parallax, promising rapid orbit characterization for upcoming large sky surveys.
Contribution
It advances a technique to recover asteroid distances from one night of observations, demonstrating low uncertainties and forecasting its effectiveness with future telescopes.
Findings
Distance uncertainties as low as 1.3% for nearby asteroids.
Achieved 3% distance accuracy with real observations within a night.
Potential to constrain asteroid distances below 1% with upcoming surveys.
Abstract
Upcoming telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) and the Argus Array will image large fractions of the sky multiple times per night yielding numerous Near Earth Object (NEO) discoveries. When asteroids are measured with short observation time windows, the dominant uncertainty in orbit construction is due to distance uncertainty to the NEO. One approach to recover distances is from topocentric parallax, which is a technique that leverages the rotation of the Earth, causing a small but detectable sinusoidal additive signal to the Right Ascension (RA) of the NEO following a period of 1 day. In this paper, we further develop and evaluate this technique to recover distances in as quickly as a single night. We first test the technique on synthetic data of 19 different asteroids ranging from to . We modify previous algorithms and quantify…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAstronomy and Astrophysical Research · Astronomical Observations and Instrumentation · Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
