The Size Distribution of the Small Near Earth Asteroids from Spacewatch

Details The Size Distribution of the Small Near Earth Asteroids from Spacewatch The Size Distribution of the Small Near Earth Asteroids from Spacewatch

Jan 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21340111h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #401.11; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.190

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We are currently in the process of analyzing five years of near earth asteroid detections from the Spacewatch 0.9 meter mosaic camera. These data represent images of approximately 80,000 square degrees which have been surveyed to a limiting magnitude of 21.5 using 20 second integrations. Over 1800 detections of NEAs have been made in a consistent automated fashion with attention to observing conditions.
In this poster, we present a careful debiasing of the Spacewatch pointing history following the methods outlined in Jedicke, Larsen and Spahr (2003) and use the data from the survey to calculate the size distribution of small (H > 22) near earth asteroids. For these small sizes we have needed to expand the size of our survey simulations by approximately 100 orders of magnitude in order to represent very small, very hard to detect NEAs. We use the simulations to model the biases of our survey and use the actual detections to explore the size distribution. We present a detailed examination of the "dip" in the size distribution first noticed by Harris (2008) between H=19 and H= 26.
Spacewatch is funded by grants from NASA's Near Earth Object Observation and Planetary Astronomy Programs, The Brinson Foundation, the estates of Richard S. Vail and Robert L. Waland and other private individuals.

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