TANGA , P.

International audience

By definition, an alert system has to be activated as fast as possible in response to a selected event. For this reason, a pipeline performing fast processing of Gaia observations of Solar System objects (SSO) is being implemented. Its output will concern moving objects that are not matched against an up-to-date catalogue of known asteroids....

Context: Observation of star occultations is a powerful tool to determine shapes and sizes of asteroids. This is key information necessary for studying the evolution of the asteroid belt and to calibrate indirect methods of size determination, such as the models used to analyze thermal infrared observations. Up to now, the observation of...

International audience

International audience

Planetary and Space Science, 56, pp. 1823-1827, http://dx.doi.org./10.1016/j.pss..02.029

According to current plans of ESA, Gaia will be launched in 2011. With a systematic survey of the whole sky down to magnitude V = 20, Gaia will provide a fundamental contribution in practically all fields of modern Astrophysics. In particular, Gaia will be also a major milestone in the history of asteroid science. Based on its unprecedented...

Context. Occultations of stars by asteroids are an efficient method to study the properties of minor bodies, and can be exploited as tools to derive very precise asteroid astrometry relative to the target star. With the availability of stellar astrometry thanks to the ESA mission Gaia, the frequency of good predictions and the quality of the...

International audience

Planetary and Space Science, 57, pp. 193-200, http://dx.doi.org./10.1016/j.pss.2008.06.016