Speakers
Description
Over the past few years ESA's Planetary Defence Office has developed a network of small to medium sized telescopes with nearly-global coverage. This network is composed by ESA-owned and operated telescopes, but also by external facilities to which our team has access via dedicated contracts, scientific collaborations, institutional agreements or traditional proposals.
The goal of such network is to provide rapid response capabilities to react to urgent follow-up observation needs, such as those imposed by imminent impactors or very close Earth fly-bys.
In this presentation we will briefly discuss how we are using such a network, and present the outcome of dedicated observing campaigns and challenging observations we performed.
We will also briefly discuss how recent advances in imaging techniques (such as CMOS sensors), hardware (GPUs) and software (synthetic tracking) capabilities have significantly improved the capabilities of small aperture instruments to obtain high quality astrometry of faint objects.
The recent case of 2022 EB5 also gives us the opportunity to discuss some of the challenges that become apparent when extracting astrometry from fast-moving targets. These span from trailing issues to timing or geographical coordinates inaccuracies, which may introduce significant biases in the astrometry and in any impact prediction derived from such measurements.
