Trails of Solar System Minor Bodies on WFC/ACS Images

Abstract

In this paper we analyse very short arcs of minor bodies of the Solar System detected on Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Channel ACS images. In particular, we address how to constrain the Keplerian orbital elements for minor body detections, illustrating the method for 2 objects. One of the minor bodies left 13 successive trails, making it the most well-sampled object yet identified in the HST archive. Most interestingly, we also address the problem of ephemeris prediction and show that in the particular case of HST very short arcs the confinement window for subsequent recovery is significantly reduced to a narrow linear region, that would facilitate successive observations.