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Discovery of Hundreds of Main-belt Asteroids with Synthetic Tracking of WISE Data

  • Authors: Emerson A. Whittaker, Jean-Luc Margot

Emerson A. Whittaker and Jean-Luc Margot 2026 The Planetary Science Journal 7 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 3.

On-sky velocities corresponding to SALTAD hits, with ecliptic latitude and longitude rates of motion shown in arcseconds per hour. The light-blue dots show all main-belt asteroids (MBAs) observed during the cryogenic portion of the WISE survey, with the purple shape outlining the 2σ contour for the on-sky velocity distribution of these MBAs. Orange stars represent objects detected by SALTAD and known to Skybot. Green triangles represent SALTAD hits matching known objects with astrometry reported by the NEOWISE team, whereas pink triangles represent SALTAD hits matching objects known to Skybot with no corresponding WISE astrometry. Most objects observed by the NEOWISE team are in Skybot’s catalog. Black triangles represent hits of previously unknown objects that survived all of the pipeline filters, while black dots represent SALTAD hits that survived all of the pipeline filters with the exception of the 2σ velocity cut or were eliminated during the merging process or later. The majority of SALTAD hits fall within the 2σ contour. Those that do not are eliminated by our pipeline filters, including some potentially false negatives, as around 5% of main-belt objects are expected to fall outside of the contour. For details about figure construction, see Section 3.5.

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