Ground-based observations of solar system bodies in complement to Gaia.

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

The ESA cornerstone mission Gaia, to be launched during end-2011, will observe ≈ 250,000 small bodies. These are mostly main belt asteroids, but also Near-Earth objects, Trojans, and a few comets, or planetary satellites. The scientific harvest that Gaia will provide - given the high astrometric accuracy (at sub-milli-arcsec level), valuable photometric measurements (at milli-mag level), and moderate imaging (about 2,000 objects will be resolved) - will have a major impact on our knowledge of this population in terms of composition, formation and evolution tep{mignard07}. There are nevertheless some intrinsic limitations in particular due to the unavoidable limited duration of the mission (5 years), the peculiar observing strategy that is not optimised to the observation of solar system objects, and last, the limited imaging possibilities. We can thus identify two kind of complementary data and ground-based observations, whether they are part of the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC), or not, but provide a strong leverage to the Gaia science.
We discuss different aspects of additional observations from ground (yet not exclusively) either in preparation to the Gaia mission, in alert during the mission, or after the mission as additional complementary information. Observations of a set of well defined and selected targets, with different telescopes and instrumentation, will increase the scientific output in three particular and important topics: mass of asteroids, their bulk density and possible link to their taxonomy, and non-gravitational forces.

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