Orbit Fitting and Uncertainties for Kuiper Belt Objects

By G. Bernstein, Bharat Khushalani. 2000

151 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 with 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.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c24857beace4db8c91e0953779a75c4eabdd294

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

The Compositions of Kuiper Belt Objects (2011, background): “Understanding the dynamical state of a KBO is straightforward: after an object is discovered, a few observations spaced over several years are usually sufficient to define a precise orbit for the object (Bernstein & Khushalani 2000).”
The Size Distribution of Trans-Neptunian Bodies (2003, background): “…one possible parameterization being {α, β, d, α̇, β̇, ḋ}, where α and β are the angular position relative to the center 5 of the mosaic at some reference time T0, d is the geocentric distance at T0, and the dots denote the TNO’s space velocity in the same basis (cf. Bernstein & Khushalani (2000)).”
The Deep Ecliptic Survey: A Search for Kuiper Belt Objects and Centaurs. II. Dynamical Classification, the Kuiper Belt Plane, and the Core Population (2005, methodology): “The differences between the orbital elements computed with the Bernstein & Khushalani (2000) method and those listed in the Bowell database are plotted as a function of time since discovery in Figure 7.”
Evidence for an Extended Scattered Disk (2001, methodology): “Using the available astrometric data and the orbit determioftware of Bernstein and Khushalani (2000), optimized lly for outer Solar System objects, we have computed an osculating orbit solution taking into account the perturbations of the four giant planets (Table I).”
Nomenclature in the Outer Solar System (2008, methodology): “For a given object, we begin with the astrometric observations from each and every one of three oppositions (or more), and perform a best fit barycentric orbit solution using the method of Bernstein and Khushalani (2000). That is, the position and velocity vectors at the time of the first observatio”
Discovery of a Planetary-sized Object in the Scattered Kuiper Belt (2005, methodology): “From this 16-year orbital arc the derived barycentric orbit using the method of Bernstein & Khushalani (2000) gives a semi-major axis, eccentricity, and inclination of a = 67.89± 0.01, e = 0.4378± 0.0001, and i = 43.993± 0.001, respectively.”
The Structure of the Kuiper Belt: Size Distribution and Radial Extent (2001, result): “In contrast, a and e are very assumption dependent, since a very large range of orbital parameters can give apparent rates at opposition matching those observed (see Bernstein & Khushalani 2000).”