Orbit Fitting and Uncertainties for Kuiper Belt Objects

Details Orbit Fitting and Uncertainties for Kuiper Belt Objects Orbit Fitting and Uncertainties for Kuiper Belt Objects

2000-08-22

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0008348v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

21 pages AASTeX5, 3 figures, accepted to AJ. Associated software available at http://www.astro.lsa.umich.edu/users/garyb

Scientific paper

10.1086/316868

We present a procedure for determination of positions and orbital elements, and associated uncertainties, of outer Solar System planets. The orbit-fitting procedure is greatly streamlined compared to traditional methods because acceleration can be treated as a perturbation to the inertial motion of the body. These techniques are immediately applicable to Kuiper Belt Objects, for which recovery observations are costly. Our methods produce positional estimates and uncertainty ellipses even in the face of the substantial degeneracies of short-arc orbit fits; the sole a priori assumption is that the orbit should be bound or nearly so. We use these orbit-fitting techniques to derive a strategy for determining Kuiper Belt orbits with a minimal number of observations.

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