2021-10-06, 09:05 PM
Talk about assured employment! Even when they find 'em they lose 'em again. These little motes become so faint after close approach I suppose they're impossible to track even with professional equipment. According to Shefer's paper his method provided ~3x better accuracy than the older methods even for short arcs. I guess many of the subsequent passes aren't as favorable as the ones when they get discovered. 2010 CA261 seems to be an excellent example of a 'lost' object.
I wonder what kind of orbit accuracy the MPC gets with a week or a month of observations. Current techniques yield much better accuracy than the photographic methods used in the past. Shefer stated that photographic methods had accuracies of ~1.6 arcsec, while CCD imagers are 10 or more times better.
If you've run any of the ephemerides for these things, it's amazing how fast they brighten & fade in a week or two.
Phil S.
I wonder what kind of orbit accuracy the MPC gets with a week or a month of observations. Current techniques yield much better accuracy than the photographic methods used in the past. Shefer stated that photographic methods had accuracies of ~1.6 arcsec, while CCD imagers are 10 or more times better.
If you've run any of the ephemerides for these things, it's amazing how fast they brighten & fade in a week or two.
Phil S.