Journal
ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL
Volume 156, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP Publishing Ltd
DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aac2e1
Keywords
astrometry; celestial mechanics; Kuiper Belt: general; Kuiper Belt objects: individual (2014 MU69); occultations
Categories
Funding
- HST programs [GO 13633, GO/DD 14053, GO 14092, GO/DD 14485, GO 14627, GO 14629, GO 15158]
- NASA through Space Telescope Science Institute
- NASA [NAS 5-26555]
- NASA's New Horizons mission
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NASA's New Horizons spacecraft will conduct a close flyby of the cold-classical Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) designated (486958) 2014 MU69 on 2019 January 1. At a heliocentric distance of 44 au, MU69 will be the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. To enable this flyby, we have developed an extremely high-precision orbit fitting and uncertainty processing pipeline, making maximal use of the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and pre-release versions of the ESA Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) catalog. This pipeline also enabled successful predictions of a stellar occultation by MU69 in 2017 July. We describe how we process the WFC3 images to match the Gaia DR2 catalog, extract positional uncertainties for this extremely faint target (typically 140 photons per WFC3 exposure), and translate those uncertainties into probability distribution functions for MU69 at any given time. We also describe how we use these uncertainties to guide New Horizons, plan stellar occultions of MU69, and derive MU69's orbital evolution and long-term stability.
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