Asteroid Mass Determination From The Gaia Space Mission And Contribution To Tests Of General Relativity

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Scientific paper

The ESA astrometric mission Gaia, due for launch in late 2011, will observe a very large number of
asteroids ( 300,000 brighter than V = 20) with an unprecedented positional precision (at the
sub-milliarcsecond level). Such high precision astrometry will not only enable to considerably improve the orbits of a large number of objects, but also to derive direct measures of the masses of the largest asteroids, and additionally contribute to test the General Relativity.
In addition to the mass that could possibly be obtained from the orbit of binary systems,
Gaia will yield masses of the hundred largest asteroids from gravitational perturbations during close approaches with target asteroids. The objective is to develop a method for determining these masses which will use simultaneously all perturbers together with their target asteroids. We will present the least-squares method for the orbit improvement and mass determination by use of variational equations. Calculations have been preformed by taking into account realistic simulation of the Gaia observations (geometry, time sequence, magnitude, ...). We next give the list of the asteroids which mass can be estimated and the corresponding formal precision. For instance, the mass of Ceres, perturbing about 300 targets, is obtained with a relative precision of 0.03%.
In addition we show the possible applications of Gaia for tests in general relativity such as the simultaneous measure of the PPN beta together with the solar quadrupole J2 from the orbit of the asteroids ...

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