2024/09/16 by Rogerio Deienno, Deienno, Rogerio, L. Denneau +17 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astro and Planetary Science #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Physical sciences #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.10453
openalex publication_date 2024/09/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This work is dedicated to debias the Near-Earth Objects (NEO) population based on observations from the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescopes. We have applied similar methods used to develop the recently released NEO model generator (NEOMOD), once debiasing the NEO population using data from Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) G96 telescope. ATLAS is composed of four different telescopes. We first analyzed observational data from each of all four telescopes separately and later combined them. Our results highlight main differences between CSS and ATLAS, e.g., sky coverage and survey power at debiasing the NEO population. ATLAS has a much larger sky coverage than CSS, allowing it to find bright NEOs that would be constantly "hiding" from CSS. Consequently, ATLAS is more powerful than CSS at debiasing the NEO population for H \lesssim 19. With its intrinsically greater sensitivity and emphasis on observing near opposition, CSS excels in the debiasing of smaller objects. ATLAS, as an all sky survey designed to find imminent hazardous objects, necessarily spends a significant fraction of time looking at places on the sky where objects do not appear, reducing its power for debiasing the population of small objects. We estimate a NEO population completeness of ≈ 88%+3%-2% for H < 17.75 and ≈ 36%+1%-1% for H < 22.25. Those numbers are similar to previous estimates (within error bars for H < 17.75) from CSS, yet, around 3% and 8% smaller at their face values, respectively. We also confirm previous finding that the ν6 secular resonance is the main source of small and faint NEOs at H = 28, whereas the 3:1 mean motion resonance with Jupiter dominates for larger and brighter NEOs at H = 15.