Journal
ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL
Volume 120, Issue 6, Pages 3323-3332Publisher
UNIV CHICAGO PRESS
DOI: 10.1086/316868
Keywords
celestial mechanics, stellar dynamics; Kuiper belt, Oort cloud
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We present a procedure for determination of positions and orbital elements, and associated uncertainties, of outer solar system planets. The orbit-fitting procedure is greatly streamlined compared with traditional methods because acceleration can be treated as a perturbation to the inertial motion of the body. These techniques are immediately applicable to Kuiper belt objects, for which recovery observations are costly. Our methods produce positional estimates and uncertainty ellipses even in the face of the substantial degeneracies of short-are orbit fits; the sole a priori assumption is that the orbit should be bound or nearly so. We use these orbit-fitting techniques to derive a strategy for determining Kuiper belt orbits with a minimal number of observations.
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