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The Pan-STARRS Synthetic Solar System Model: a Tool for Testing and Efficiency Determination of the Moving Object Processing System

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The Pan-STARRS Synthetic Solar System Model: a Tool for Testing and Efficiency Determination of the Moving Object Processing System The Pan-STARRS Synthetic Solar System Model: A tool for testing and efficiency determination of the Moving Object Processing System Tommy Grav Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University [email protected] Robert Jedicke Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii [email protected] Larry Denneau Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii [email protected] Steve Chesley Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology [email protected] Matthew J. Holman Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics [email protected] Timothy B. Spahr Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics [email protected] March 27, 2008 Submitted to Icarus. Manuscript: 76 pages, with 2 tables and 23 figures. Corresponding author: Tommy Grav Department of Physics and Astronomy Johns Hopkins University 3400 N. Charles St. Baltimore, MD 21218 Phone: (410) 516-7683 Email: [email protected] 2 Abstract We present here the Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System (MOPS) Synthetic Solar System Model (S3M), the first ever attempt at building a com- prehensive flux-limited model of the small bodies in the solar system. The model is made up of synthetic populations of near-Earth objects (NEOs with a sub-population of Earth impactors), the main belt asteroids (MBAs), Trojans of all planets from Venus through Neptune, Centaurs, trans-neptunian objects (classical, resonant and scattered TNOs), long period comets (LPCs), and in- terstellar comets (ICs). All of these populations are complete to a minimum of V = 24:5, corresponding to approximately the expected limiting magnitude for Pan-STARRS'sability to detect moving objects. The only exception to this rule are the NEOs, which are complete to H = 25 (corresponding to objects of about 50 meter in diameter). The S3M provides an invaluable tool in the design and testing of the MOPS software, and will also be used in the monitoring of the upcoming Pan-STARRS all-sky survey, scheduled to start science operations in the fall of 2008. 1 Introduction The first asteroid was discovered over two centuries ago, and since then as- tronomers have spent untold hours trying to catalog as many of these wander- ing stars as possible. By the turn of the 20th century slightly more than 330 asteroids were known, mostly discovered by Max Wolf. He pioneered the use of astrophotography, a technique in which the asteroids appeared as short streaks on photographic plates with long exposures. While this dramatically increased the number of discoveries, only a few thousand asteroids had well established orbits at the end of the 20th century, as most astronomers had little interest in these vermin of the sky. It was the increased interest in the potential hazardous asteroids (PHA) that launched another significant increase in the discovery rate of the asteroid population of the Solar System. The PHAs have orbits which frequently take them close to the Earth and in time could collide with it. Public awareness of this asteroid threat resulted in a mandate from the US Congress to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to search, find and catalog 90 percent of Near-Earth Objects (NEO) with diameters larger than 1 kilometer (Morrison, 1992). The current estimate is that this goal will be achieved some time after the 2008 deadline set forth by Congress and NASA (Jedicke et al., 2003). Using wide-field charge-coupled devices (CCDs) and au- tomated reduction pipelines, a number of ground based survey telescopes (like Spacewatch, the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking, the Lincoln Near-Earth Aster- oid Research and the Catalina Sky Survey) have increased the discovery rate to over 5,000 new asteroids per month (Stokes et al., 2002). Currently, as of the start of 2008, over 170,000 asteroids have well-defined orbits and have been numbered (only about 14,000 of these have been named). These wide-field surveys have given a wealth of new information on the minor planets of the solar system, but the surveys have either been limited by 1 the depth they can reach, or in the area they can cover. In 2001 the astronomy community of the US issued a decadal review (Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee et al., 2001) that recommended the implementation of a large synoptic survey telescope to survey the visible sky every week to a fainter limit than reached by any existing survey. The goal of this telescope would be to catalog over 90 percent of the NEOs larger than 300 meters in diameter and thus assess the threat these objects could pose to Earth's population. Such a telescope would also discover an order of magnitude more asteroids for most other solar system populations than is currently known, as well as perform an almost unlimited number of projects ranging from studies of the local solar neighborhood to cosmology. With this recommendation a new paradigm has come upon the astronomy and astrophysical community, where all-sky surveys will be able to penetrate significantly deeper and cover significantly larger areas than before. The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS; Hodapp et al., 2004) is one of several different implementations of this next generation of all-sky surveys. Pan-STARRS is a two-step project: The first step, a 1.8-meter telescope, called Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1), has been built on Haleakela, Hawaii. It is to be operated by the Pan-STARRS 1 Science Consor- tium (www.ps1sc.org) and will begin its all-sky survey during the fall of 2008. It features a giga-pixel camera (GPC1; with 1.44 billion pixels) with a field of view of ∼ 7 sq. degrees, which gives a pixel-scale of 0:3 arcseconds. The camera uses a new CCD technology called Orthogonal Transfer Arrays (OTA; Tonry et al., 1997, 2006; Burke et al., 2007) that allow charges to move in both spa- tial directions in real time to compensate for the image motion caused by the atmosphere and tracking inaccuracies of the telescope. The OTA-technology thus provides a tip-tilt correction in the electronics rather than through manip- 2 ulation of the secondary mirror, allowing for sub-arcsecond seeing over the full field of view, rather than just inside the isoplanatic angle around the center of the field. About 60 percent of the available observing time will be dedicated to observing almost the entire visible sky using the Sloan grizy-filters in what is called the 3π survey. This survey will cover ∼ 10; 000 sq. degrees each week, reach a limiting magnitude of ∼ 22:7 in the three main filters (gri), and the cadence of the observations are designed with the discovery of moving objects in mind. This gives the system the ability to detect, track and catalog an un- precedented set of solar system bodies, from the fast moving near-Earth objects (NEOs) to the slow moving distant trans-neptunian populations (TNOs). The second part of the project is designated Pan-STARRS 4 (PS4) and consists of four telescopes of the same size as PS1, each equipped with its own giga-pixel camera with the same field of view as GPC1. This collection of telescopes will simultaneously observe the same field of the sky, and coadding of the images will make it possible to reach a limiting magnitude of ∼ 24:5 in the three main Sloan filters (gri). PS4 will thus perform the same survey as PS1, but with a deeper limiting magnitude and a project lifetime two to three times as long. Each image taken with the GPC1 requires ∼ 2 gigabytes of storage and with an exposure time of ∼ 30 seconds the survey will accumulate ∼ 1 Terabyte of data per night. In order to quickly handle and reduce this enormous amount of data a state-of-the-art software pipeline has been created. First the images are processed by the Image Processing Pipeline (IPP; Magnier, 2006), which detect any transient source available in the images through the use of difference imaging. These transient detections are then handed to a number of science clients looking for moving objects, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts and other transient phenomena. The science client in charge of handling moving solar system objects is the Moving Object Processing System (MOPS; Kubica et al., 3 2007). This fully automatic pipeline is designed to discover, link, track and catalog 90 percent of the potentially hazardous objects (PHOs) and 80 percent of all other known populations of small objects in the solar system, if they have a minimum of two detections on at least three nights during a lunation (note that a MOPS lunation runs from full moon to full moon, rather than the more common definition from new moon to new moon). It is expected that the survey will produce on the order of ∼ 5 million new solar system objects, thus increasing the number of known moving objects by at least an order of magnitude. This will provide an unprecedented opportunity to understand not only the current dynamical state of the solar system, but also will provide a window into its formation and evolution. The Pan-STARRS 1 survey is expected to increase the number of known NEOs, jovian Trojans and trans-neptunian objects to rival the number of currently known main belt asteroids (MBAs), finally making it possible to understand these populations to the same degree that we today understand the main belt. One of the major difficulties encountered in interpreting the data collected during a survey of minor planets is understanding how selection effects have contributed in generating the sample. This bias is made up of a complex set of factors dependent on, among others, the physical and dynamical properties of the asteroids, the characteristics of the detector and telescope, the abilities of the software, and the decisions of the observers.
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