Orbit Fitting and Uncertainties for Kuiper Belt Objects (original) (raw)
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© 2000. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.
The Astronomical Journal,Volume 120,Number 6Citation Gary Bernstein and Bharat Khushalani 2000 AJ 120 3323DOI 10.1086/316868
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Dates
- Received 2000 July 11
- Accepted 2000 August 16
1538-3881/120/6/3323
Abstract
We present a procedure for determination of positions and orbital elements, and associated uncertainties, of outer solar system planets. The orbit-fitting procedure is greatly streamlined compared with traditional methods because acceleration can be treated as a perturbation to the inertial motion of the body. These techniques are immediately applicable to Kuiper belt objects, for which recovery observations are costly. Our methods produce positional estimates and uncertainty ellipses even in the face of the substantial degeneracies of short-arc orbit fits; the sole a priori assumption is that the orbit should be bound or nearly so. We use these orbit-fitting techniques to derive a strategy for determining Kuiper belt orbits with a minimal number of observations.
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