WISE, a mission that will find ALL the neighbours |
WISE, a mission that will find ALL the neighbours |
Aug 27 2009, 08:31 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3516 Joined: 4-November 05 From: North Wales Member No.: 542 |
I'm used to reading excellent articles by Emily, but this one I found to be of truly extraordinary interest:
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002070/ |
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Jun 22 2010, 11:55 PM
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Member Group: Members Posts: 540 Joined: 17-November 05 From: Oklahoma Member No.: 557 |
There have been some cases of follow up observations of asteroids being made months later (blast from the past), and a few cases of WISE making all the observations necessary by itself to designate an asteroid (WISE only). Also a very few cases of finding an asteroid only with WISE data months after the observations (2010 AR85 is an example). Here is the link to the asteroid discovery page at the WISE website.
WISE asteroid discoveries Note that this is mostly for NEAs. For parallax observations, WISE fortunately is always observing at right angles to the sun, so that even objects in the ecliptic plane will be observed at maximum angular displacement six months later. During the nine month mission about half the sky will be observed by WISE alone with parallax data points. Unfortunately, in most cases you will also need a data point at one year in order to subtract out the proper motion, which in most cases dwarfs the parallax. The mission will end after nine months. Follow ups will have to be with some other telescope. Large proper motion itself might be the main indicator they are looking for, in order to find nearby objects (nearby in this case meaning stellar neighborhood). A person at WISE outreach was kind enough to inform me that they can determine positional accuracy for stars to better than half an arc second. This is in line with the residuals I see listed on the asteroid reports from the minor planet center. So anything closer than, say, five or six light years should produce a measurable parallax, albeit with a fairly large error. |
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