Spacewatch Model-Independent Technique for Correcting Observational Bias

Details Spacewatch Model-Independent Technique for Correcting Observational Bias Spacewatch Model-Independent Technique for Correcting Observational Bias

Sep 1996

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996dps....28.1004m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #28, #10.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 28, p.1096

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The first of January, 2001 will mark the 200th anniversary of the discovery of Ceres by Piazzi. It took sixty-seven years before the one hundredth minor planet was discovered and until 1890 to triple this number. The Spacewatch detector system can now automatically detect hundreds of asteroids in nearly real-time during a single night of observing. The Spacewatch survey program observed ~ 3740 square degrees near the ecliptic from 1992 to 1995 and made observations of more than 60,000 asteroids. The limiting magnitude of the detection system during this time was about V ~ 21. Circular orbits obtained from the observations yield distances to the objects which provide absolute magnitudes for the asteroids accurate to about 0.5 magnitudes. The Spacewatch Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) observations were treated by Rabinowitz who used a Monte Carlo model of an NEA orbit population which was then passed through a simulation of the Spacewatch detector system. The method requires a realistic input orbit distribution as well as a good simulation of the detector. Since it relies on a priori assumptions of the input distribution the technique produces a model dependent measure of the bias. This paper introduces a technique for debiasing asteroid observations which is independent of the actual distribution of the asteroids. The method is only limited by an understanding of the detector system efficiency and by the computational requirements of the integration. The implementation of this technique could be simplified considerably for a survey which was specifically designed for asteroid population studies.

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