DefinePK

Abstract

The data set collected during the night of discovery of a minor body constitutes a too-short arc (TSA), resulting in failure of the differential correction procedure. This makes it necessary to recover the object during subsequent nights to gather more observations that will allow a preliminary orbit to be calculated. In this work, we present a recovery technique based on sampling the admissible region (AdRe) by the constrained Delaunay triangulation. We construct the AdRe in its topocentric and geocentric variants, using logarithmic and exponential metrics, for the following near-Earth asteroids: 3122 Florence, 3200 Phaethon, 2003 GW, 1864 Daedalus, 2003 BH84 and 1977 QQ5; and the main-belt asteroids: 1738 Oosterhoff, 4690 Strasbourg, 555 Norma, 2006 SO375, 2003 GE55 and 32811 Apisaon. Using our sampling technique, we established the ephemeris region for these objects, using intervals of observation from 25 minutes up to 2 hours, with propagation times from 1 up to 47 days. All these objects were recoverable in a field of vision of 95' x 72', except for 3122 Florence and 3200 Phaethon, since they were observed during their closest approach to the Earth. In the case of 2006 SO375, we performed an additional test with only two observations separated by 2 minutes, achieving a recovery of up to 28 days after its discovery, which demonstrates the potential of our technique. We implement our recovery technique in a web service available at http://observatorioenlinea.utp.edu.co/recoveryservice/.