Treatment of Star Catalog Biases in Asteroid Astrometric Observations

Details Treatment of Star Catalog Biases in Asteroid Astrometric Observations Treatment of Star Catalog Biases in Asteroid Astrometric Observations

May 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009dda....40.1704c&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #40, #17.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.911

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Significant and systematic biases in the postfit residuals of astrometric observations of numbered asteroids have led to concern that the resulting orbital fits are biased in a systematic way that could compromise the validity of orbital predictions, and in particular the computed prediction uncertainties. We show that the dominant cause of the residual biases stems from systematic astrometric errors induced by local errors in the star catalogs used to reduce most of the observations. We present a technique to debias observations associated with the USNO A1.0. A2.0, and B1.0 catalogs, and show that observations based on UCAC and Tycho catalogs do not carry substantial biases. This assures debiased astrometry for over 90% of the 58 million CCD observations in the Minor Planet Center astrometric data set. Further work should lead to a significantly higher percentage of debiased observations. We show that orbital fits using the debiased astrometry provide significantly improved fits and predictions, as compared to those obtained with the raw astrometry, which exhibit errors much higher than indicated by their formal uncertainties.

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