The Mars flyby of C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) represented a unique opportunity for imaging a long-period comet and resolving its nucleus and rotation period. Because of the small encounter distance and the high relative velocity, the goal of successful
ly observing C/2013 A1 from the Mars orbiting spacecrafts posed strict accuracy requirements on the comets ephemerides. These requirements were hard to meet, as comets are known for being highly unpredictable: astrometric observations can be significantly biased and nongravitational perturbations affect comet trajectories. Therefore, even prior to the encounter, we remeasured a couple of hundred astrometric images obtained with ground-based and Earth-orbiting telescopes. We also observed the comet with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiters High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on 2014 October 7. In particular, these HiRISE observations were decisive in securing the trajectory and revealed that out-of-plane nongravitational perturbations were larger than previously assumed. Though the resulting ephemeris predictions for the Mars encounter allowed observations of the comet from the Mars orbiting spacecrafts, post-encounter observations show a discrepancy with the pre-encounter trajectory. We reconcile this discrepancy by employing the Rotating Jet Model, which is a higher fidelity model for nongravitational perturbations and provides an estimate of C/2013 A1s spin pole.
We describe systematic ranging, an orbit determination technique especially suitable to assess the near-term Earth impact hazard posed by newly discovered asteroids. For these late warning cases, the time interval covered by the observations is gener
ally short, perhaps a few hours or even less, which leads to severe degeneracies in the orbit estimation process. The systematic ranging approach gets around these degeneracies by performing a raster scan in the poorly-constrained space of topocentric range and range rate, while the plane of sky position and motion are directly tied to the recorded observations. This scan allows us to identify regions corresponding to collision solutions, as well as potential impact times and locations. From the probability distribution of the observation errors, we obtain a probability distribution in the orbital space and then estimate the probability of an Earth impact. We show how this technique is effective for a number of examples, including 2008 TC3 and 2014 AA, the only two asteroids to date discovered prior to impact.
We provide a scheme to correct asteroid astrometric observations for star catalog systematic errors due to inaccurate star positions and proper motions. As reference we select the most accurate stars in the PPMXL catalog, i.e., those based on 2MASS a
strometry. We compute position and proper motion corrections for 19 of the most used star catalogs. The use of these corrections provides better ephemeris predictions and improves the error statistics of astrometric observations, e.g., by removing most of the regional systematic errors previously seen in Pan-STARRS PS1 asteroid astrometry. The correction table is publicly available at ftp://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/ssd/debias/debias_2014.tgz and can be freely used in orbit determination algorithms to obtain more reliable asteroid trajectories.
We assess the risk of an Earth impact for asteroid (99942) Apophis by means of a statistical analysis accounting for the uncertainty of both the orbital solution and the Yarkovsky effect. We select those observations with either rigorous uncertainty
information provided by the observer or a high established accuracy. For the Yarkovsky effect we perform a Monte Carlo simulation that fully accounts for the uncertainty in the physical characterization, especially for the unknown spin orientation. By mapping the uncertainty information onto the 2029 b-plane and identifying the keyholes corresponding to subsequent impacts we assess the impact risk for future encounters. In particular, we find an impact probability greater than 10^-6 for an impact in 2068. We analyze the stability of the impact probability with respect to the assumptions on Apophis physical characterization and consider the possible effect of the early 2013 radar apparition.
We seek evidence of the Yarkovsky effect among Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) by measuring the Yarkovsky-related orbital drift from the orbital fit. To prevent the occurrence of unreliable detections we employ a high precision dynamical model, including
the Newtonian attraction of 16 massive asteroids and the planetary relativistic terms, and a suitable astrometric data treatment. We find 21 NEAs whose orbital fits show a measurable orbital drift with a signal to noise ratio (SNR) greater than 3. The best determination is for asteroid (101955) 1999 RQ36, resulting in the recovery of one radar apparition and an orbit improvement by two orders of magnitude. In addition, we find 16 cases with a lower SNR that, despite being less reliable, are good candidates for becoming stronger detections in the future. In some cases it is possible to constrain physical quantities otherwise unknown by means of the detected orbital drift. Furthermore, the distribution of the detected orbital drifts shows an excess of retrograde rotators that can be connected to the delivery mechanism from the most important NEA feeding resonances and allows us to infer the distribution for NEAs obliquity. We discuss the implications of the Yarkovsky effect for impact predictions. In particular, for asteroid (29075) 1950 DA our results favor a retrograde rotation that would rule out an impact in 2880.
