Asteroid Diameters and Albedos from NEOWISE Reactivation Mission Years 4 and 5

Joseph R. Masiero, A. K. Mainzer, J. M. Bauer, R. M. Cutri, T. Grav, E. Kramer, J. Pittichová, S. Sonnett, E. L. Wright

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

26 Scopus citations

Abstract

The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft has been conducting a two-band thermal infrared survey to detect and characterize asteroids and comets since its reactivation in 2013 December. Using the observations collected during the fourth and fifth years of the survey, our automated pipeline detected candidate moving objects that were verified and reported to the Minor Planet Center. Using these detections, we perform thermal modeling of each object from the near-Earth object (NEO) and Main Belt asteroid (MBA) populations to constrain their sizes. We present thermal model fits of asteroid diameters for 189 NEOs and 5831 MBAs detected during the fourth year of the survey, and 185 NEOs and 5776 MBAs from the fifth year. To date, the NEOWISE Reactivation survey has provided thermal model characterization for 957 unique NEOs. Including all phases of the original Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer survey brings the total to 1473 unique NEOs that have been characterized between 2010 and the present.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number5
JournalPlanetary Science Journal
Volume1
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2020

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Earth and Planetary Sciences (miscellaneous)
  • Space and Planetary Science
  • Geophysics

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