Detecting Earth’s Temporarily Captured Natural Irregular Satellites Bryce Bolin1 (
[email protected]), Robert Jedicke1, Mikael Granvik2, Peter Brown3, Monique Chyba4, Ellen Howell5, Mike Nolan5, Geoff Patterson3, Richard Wainscoat1 Received ; accepted N Pages, N Figures, N Table 1University of Hawaii, Institute for Astronomy, 2680 Woodlawn Dr, Honolulu, HI, 96822 2Department of Physics, P.O. BOX 64, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland 3University of Western Ontario, Physics & Astronomy Department, London, Ontario, Canada 4University of Hawaii, Department of Mathematics, Honolulu, HI, 96822 5Arecibo Observatory, Arecibo, Puerto Rico –2– ABSTRACT JEDICKE WILL WRITE ONCE REMAINDER OF PAPER IS COMPLETE. Subject headings: Near-Earth Objects; Asteroids, Dynamics –3– Proposed Running Head: Detecting Earth’s Natural Irregular Satellites Editorial correspondence to: Bryce Bolin Institute for Astronomy University of Hawaii 2680 Woodlawn Drive Honolulu, HI 96822 Phone: +1 808 294 6299 Fax: +1 808 988 2790 E-mail:
[email protected] –4– 1. Introduction Granvik et al. (2012) introduced the idea that there exists a steady state population of temporarily captured orbiters (TCO) that are natural irregular satellites of the Earth. They are captured from a dynamically suitable subset of the near Earth object (NEO) population — those that are on Earth-like orbits with semi-major axis a 1.0 AU, eccentricity e 0.0 ∼ ∼ and inclinations i 0 deg — and complete an average of 2.88 0.82(rms) revolutions ∼ ± around Earth during their average capture duration of 286 18(rms) days. In this work ± we evaluate options for detecting the TCOs as they are being captured, while they are on their geocentric trajectories, and in their meteor phase (about 1% of TCOs enter Earth’s atmosphere).