Speakers
Description
ESA's Planetary Defence Office has traditionally focused most of its observational activities to astrometry, in order to provide high-precision measurements for the orbit determination and impact monitoring processes that form a significant component of our activities.
Although most of our observations are still designed to optimize the astrometric output, during the last year we have increased our attention to other types of observations, including some planned specifically to physically characterize NEOs.
In this talk we will briefly introduce our observational network, and highlight how some of the facilities we use can also be beneficial for physical characterization observations.
We will then go into more detail on how our usual astrometric observations are performed, highlighting the peculiar observation modes that characterize them, such as the unfiltered and uncalibrated observing mode, the low SNR regime, and the techniques we use to extract positional measurements.
At the same time, we will highlight how astrometrically-focused datasets can still contain valuable physical information which, with some care and under some caveats, can be used to extract valuable characterization information.
Finally, we will briefly discuss how high-precision astrometric observations can indirectly provide physical characterization information, by accurately measuring dynamical properties (e.g. Yarkovsky effect or solar radiation pressure) that can be tied to physical properties of the object.
