Asteroid Families Portal (original) (raw)

Proper Elements Catalogs

The catalogs contain proper orbital elements of numbered asteroids and main-belt comets computed numerically by means of a synthetic theory by Knežević & Milani (2000,2003).

There are however some differences between the procedure proposed by aforementioned authors and the one used to produce the catalogs available here:

• Orbits of all asteroids are numerically propagated for 10 Myr
• All numerical integrations are made within the same dynamical model
• All proper elements calculations are performed using the same version of the software

Asteroid proper orbital elements (available for 1,052,382 objects in total, as of October 2022):

Numbered asteroids (596,526 objects):

• afp.num.pro (file size: ~63MB)
• afp.num.sig (file size: ~50MB)

Multi-opposition asteroids (455,856 objects):

• afp.mult.pro (file size: ~48MB)
• afp.mult.sig (file size: ~38MB)

Proper orbital elements for active main-belt asteroids:

• mbc.pro
• mbc.sig

Information on the format of the catalogs:

The format of files containing proper elements:

• Column 1: Asteroid number/designation
• Column 2: Absolute magnitude (Note: The flag '99.99' is used when the information is not available.)
• Column 3: Proper semi-major axis [au]
• Column 4: Proper eccentricity
• Column 5: Sine of proper inclination
• Column 6: Proper frequency of mean motion [deg/yr]
• Column 7: Proper frequency of perihelion longitude [arcsec/yr]
• Column 8: Proper frequency of nodal longitude [arcsec/yr]
• Column 9: Lyapunov time [kyr]
• Column10: Integration time span [Myr]

The format of files containing standard deviations of proper elements residuals:

• Column 1: Asteroid number/designation
• Column 2: Root-mean-square error of proper semi-major axis
• Column 3: Root-mean-square error of eccentricity
• Column 4: Root-mean-square error of sine of proper inclination
• Column 5: Root-mean-square error of proper of mean motion frequency [deg/yr]
• Column 6: Root-mean-square error of proper perihelion longitude frequency [arcsec/yr]
• Column 7: Root-mean-square error of proper nodal longitude frequency [arcsec/yr]

Referencing the proper elements dataset:

If your publication is based on the asteroid proper elements dataset, please cite the following work as a general reference for the AFP portal:

Bojan Novaković, David Vokrouhlický, Federica Spoto and David Nesvorný:Asteroid Families: properties, recent advances and future opportunities2022, Celest Mech Dyn Astro, 134, id. 34