Bibcode
Mainzer, A.; Grav, T.; Bauer, J.; Masiero, J.; McMillan, R. S.; Cutri, R. M.; Walker, R.; Wright, E.; Eisenhardt, P.; Tholen, D. J.; Spahr, T.; Jedicke, R.; Denneau, L.; DeBaun, E.; Elsbury, D.; Gautier, T.; Gomillion, S.; Hand, E.; Mo, W.; Watkins, J.; Wilkins, A.; Bryngelson, G. L.; Del Pino Molina, A.; Desai, S.; Gómez Camus, M.; Hidalgo, S. L.; Konstantopoulos, I.; Larsen, J. A.; Maleszewski, C.; Malkan, M. A.; Mauduit, J.-C.; Mullan, B. L.; Olszewski, E. W.; Pforr, J.; Saro, A.; Scotti, J. V.; Wasserman, L. H.
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 743, Issue 2, article id. 156 (2011).
Advertised on:
12
2011
Journal
Citations
307
Refereed citations
287
Description
With the NEOWISE portion of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer
(WISE) project, we have carried out a highly uniform survey of the
near-Earth object (NEO) population at thermal infrared wavelengths
ranging from 3 to 22 μm, allowing us to refine estimates of their
numbers, sizes, and albedos. The NEOWISE survey detected NEOs the same
way whether they were previously known or not, subject to the
availability of ground-based follow-up observations, resulting in the
discovery of more than 130 new NEOs. The survey's uniform sensitivity,
observing cadence, and image quality have permitted extrapolation of the
428 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) detected by NEOWISE during the fully
cryogenic portion of the WISE mission to the larger population. We find
that there are 981 ± 19 NEAs larger than 1 km and 20,500 ±
3000 NEAs larger than 100 m. We show that the Spaceguard goal of
detecting 90% of all 1 km NEAs has been met, and that the cumulative
size distribution is best represented by a broken power law with a slope
of 1.32 ± 0.14 below 1.5 km. This power-law slope produces ~13,
200 ± 1900 NEAs with D > 140 m. Although previous studies
predict another break in the cumulative size distribution below D ~
50-100 m, resulting in an increase in the number of NEOs in this size
range and smaller, we did not detect enough objects to comment on this
increase. The overall number for the NEA population between 100 and 1000
m is lower than previous estimates. The numbers of near-Earth comets and
potentially hazardous NEOs will be the subject of future work.
Related projects
Milky Way and Nearby Galaxies
The general aim of the project is to research the structure, evolutionary history and formation of galaxies through the study of their resolved stellar populations, both from photometry and spectroscopy. The group research concentrates in the most nearby objects, namely the Local Group galaxies including the Milky Way and M33 under the hypothesis
Martín
López Corredoira