Understanding Orbital Uncertainty and Assessing Impact Risk in the Classroom

Details Understanding Orbital Uncertainty and Assessing Impact Risk in the Classroom Understanding Orbital Uncertainty and Assessing Impact Risk in the Classroom

May 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008aas...212.9709p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #212, #97.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.274

Mathematics

Probability

Scientific paper

We present a software toolkit enabling the assessment of asteroid impact risk in the undergraduate classroom. This is part of an NSF-funded CCLI grant to develop Research Based Science Education (RBSE) curricula for undergraduate non-majors. These curricula include six projects covering astrometric, photometric, and spectroscopic techniques, which are being tested at multiple schools of varying sizes around the country.
The toolkit begins with a Java plugin we have developed for the public-domain image-processor ImageJ. Students perform both astrometry and aperture photometry on research-grade astronomical images, producing output suitable for submission to the Minor Planet Center. They then feed this astrometric record into the freeware orbit-determination software Find_Orb, which computes elements for hundreds of possible orbits by the method of observational Monte Carlo. After format conversion with an online utility we have written, this custom orbit database is fed into the Starry Night planetarium program. Students are then able to visualize the uncertainty region from any desired perspective, and to observe how that region changes with time and/or additional data. Alternatively, the output from the ImageJ plugin can be used directly to measure the lightcurves of minor planets, leading to an improved understanding of their shapes.
The recent near-Earth and Mars-crossing asteroid 2007 WD5 presents an ideal scenario for testing this toolkit. All observations fall within 90 days of its 2008 Jan 30 close approach with Mars, and the 1-in-25 impact probability resulting from the inclusion of SDSS precovery observations is sufficiently large to be replicated with a relatively small number of "clone” orbits. Our plugin is the first FITS reader to produce correct time-stamps for minor planet observations found in the SDSS, which observes in drift-scan mode. We report on the first test of this project with undergraduate students at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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