The DANEOPS Project

DANEOPS Home Page

DLR-Archenhold Near Earth Objects Precovery Survey (DANEOPS)

The DANEOPS project has been initiated to systematically search existing photographic plate archives for precovery images of known NEOs.

It is organized as a cooperation between Gerhard Hahn, DLR Institute of Space Sensor Technology and Planetary Exploration and Andreas Doppler and Arno Gnädig, from an amateur working group at the Archenhold Observatory. Since November 1999 Matthias Busch and Reiner Stoss from the amateur group at the Starkenburg Observatory are participating with recovery observations.

Through a cooperation with the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory, in course of U.D.A.S., the Uppsala-DLR-Asteroid-Survey Project, recovery observations are made with the 1m Schmidt telescope in Kvistaberg, in response to DANEOPS predictions.

The available digitized sky survey archive logs are searched for plates which could contain images of known NEOs. At the moment digitized images from the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS) - 1.2m Oschin Schmidt, and from the Anglo-Australian Observatory - 1.2m UK-Schmidt are used, i.e. we use DSS 1 and 2 from the STScI Digitized Sky Survey These data are copyrighted material. See their proper acknowledgements.

Through the webinterface of Skymorph we can access the digital archive of the JPL/NEAT programme after searching their image logfile to make predictions. All successful precoveries found in this way are presented as animations on the corresponding asteroids page (see below).

Similarily, we search the archive of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) to identify predicted NEO trail on the images of the CFH12k Camera.

Recently we got access to part of the ESO Schmidt plate archive, in digitized form, from archive tapes kindly provided by the former Astronomical Institute of the University of Münster.

We routinely use the excellent website of the USNO Flagstaff Station Integrated Image and Catalogue Archive Service and acknowledge these services thankfully.

Since it is not possible for us to identify the names of the observers who took the original Schmidt plates we would like to acknowledge anonymously all of them here, and explicitly stress that we only do have access to the digitized frames, which do not contain the relevant information.

Fully perturbed n-body ephemeris calculations based on the current osculating orbital elements are generated over a period of 50 years and checked for presumptive images. Specially developed software by Andreas Doppler and Arno Gnädig performs this task.

The retrieved images are checked and compared with the predicted trails in both length and orientation. The successfully identified images are then measured astrometrically, again with special software developed by Arno Gnädig. The USNO SA2.0 catalogue is used as reference.

As a rule, the obtained positions will be checked with an orbit improvement routine prior to its submission to the MPC.

This procedure will be used for all known, and continously applied to newly discovered NEOs, on a routine basis, allowing a rapid check for precovery images.

This is an attempt to actively contribute to the Spaceguard Survey, and it is hoped to get access to additional plate archives in the future. Furthermore we plan to perform recovery observations based on predictions from improved ephemerides in order to verify uncertain archive identifications.

Other groups working on a similar program:

ANEOPP the Arcetri Near Earth Object Precovery Program

DANEOPS Team

at DLR Berlin-Adlershof

at Archenhold Observatory

Andreas Doppler

Arno Gnädig

at Starkenburg Observatory

Matthias Busch

Reiner Stoss

at Uppsala Observatory

Claes-Ingvar Lagerkvist

Tarmo Oja

Johan Warell

Ola Karlsson

Through a cooperation with Rob McNaught at Siding Spring Observatory we get direct access to the locally available UK Schmidt plates. Rob is checking predicted plates on our request and performs the necessary measurements at the spot.

Observing campaigns:

In June 2001, we got access to the 1.5m Spanish telescope at Calar Alto (through a cooperation with Thomas Müller and Rainer Kresken from ESA) which allowed us to perform dedicated recovery and follow-up observations of NEOs. A detailed report about this campaign and its results can be found here: Calar Alto campaign (recently updated and extensively illustrated and commented by Arno Gnädig)