Prospects for Improving the Masses of (1) Ceres and (4) Vesta Prior to Dawn's Arrival at These Asteroids

Details Prospects for Improving the Masses of (1) Ceres and (4) Vesta Prior to Dawn's Arrival at These Asteroids Prospects for Improving the Masses of (1) Ceres and (4) Vesta Prior to Dawn's Arrival at These Asteroids

Jul 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dda....38.0902h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DDA meeting #38, #9.02

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

In the interest of mission planning, it is desirable to have the best possible estimate of the masses of the dwarf planets Vesta and Ceres prior to Dawn's arrival at Vesta in October 2011 and Ceres in February 2015. Current estimates of the masses of these two bodies have realistic uncertainties of about 5% of their masses. Most of these mass estimates depend on observations that are decades old. Post-Hipparcos astrometry allows asteroid positions to be determined with accuracies of about 1.5 magnitudes better than previously. In addition, the explosion of discoveries of main belt asteroids since the mid-1990s means that it may be possible to discover candidate asteroids that, in the next few years, will encounter Vesta or Ceres close enough and with low enough relative velocities that the change in their orbits will allow an improvement in the mass estimates of the massive bodies. In this study, a series of simple filters were developed to determine if any such candidate perturbed bodies exist. Those candidates that made it through the filters were then subjected to a more rigorous examination to determine the nature of their encounters with Ceres or Vesta. Six candidate encounters were discovered for Vesta, all of which have a marginal chance of improving our knowledge of its mass. A total of 26 encounters were found for Ceres, many of which are almost certainly strong enough to provide a mass estimate with significantly smaller uncertainty than current estimates.

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