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Shadow hunters capture Didymos asteroid eclipsing stars

Written by  Thursday, 20 October 2022 11:29
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Setup for occultation observation

After months of effort, astronomers have succeeded in capturing the momentary shadow cast by the Didymos asteroid, from tens of million km away as it passed in front of far-distant stars – a feat of observation only made possible when both the trajectory of the asteroid and the precise location of the stars are known. Even in that case, to have a chance of success, several observers had to be placed in meticulously predicted locations across the path of the shadow, to glimpse the fleeting fading of the star within just a fraction of a second.

Gaia mapping of asteroids in the Solar System
Gaia mapping of asteroids in the Solar System

The ACROSS team: P. Tanga (project coordinator, Université Côte d’Azur, OCA, CNRS/Lab. Lagrange), K. Tsiganis (partner coordinator, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), D. Souami (ACROSS post-doc, Université Côte d’Azur, OCA, CNRS/Lab. Lagrange), J. Ferreira (post-doc, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), A. Siakas (student, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

P. Tanga, K. Tsiganis, and D. Souami are also members of the DART IT (Investigation Team). Data collected by DART IT were used to extract astrometry of Didymos using the high accuracy pipeline developed by S. Bouquillon (Observatoire de Paris) for the ground-based follow-up of the Gaia satellite http://gbot.obspm.fr/

Steve Chesley is at JPL / Solar System Dynamic group https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov

Roger Venable and Robert Dunford are occultation observers affiliated to International Occultation Timing Association (IOTA). The campaign in Japan was led by Hiroyuki Watanabe from the Japan Occultation Information Network (JOIN).

ACROSS heavily relies on the orbFit software for orbit improvement (F. Spoto, Minor Planet Center), on the Horizons web service by JPL (https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/) and on astrometry provided by ESA/Gaia.

ACROSS acknowledges support by ESA contract 2-1775/21/NL/GL/ov


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