Catalog Service: Astrometry of Pluto from 1930-1951 observations
Description
We present a new analysis of 843 photographic plates of Pluto taken by Carl Lampland at Lowell Observatory from 1930-1951. This large collection of plates contains useful astrometric information that improves our knowledge of Pluto's orbit. This improvement provides critical support to the impending flyby of Pluto by New Horizons. New Horizons can do inbound navigation of the system to improve its targeting. This navigation is capable of nearly eliminating the sky-plane errors but can do little to constrain the time of closest approach. Thus the focus on this work was to better determine Pluto's heliocentric distance and to determine the uncertainty on that distance with a particular eye to eliminating systematic errors that might have been previously unrecognized. This work adds 596 new astrometric measurements based on the USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog 4. With the addition of these data the uncertainty of the estimated heliocentric position of Pluto in Developmental Ephemerides 432 (DE432) is at the level of 1000km. This new analysis gives us more confidence that these estimations are accurate and are sufficient to support a successful flyby of Pluto by New Horizons.
This section describes who is responsible for this resource
Publisher: CDSivo://CDS[Pub. ID]
Contact Information:
This section provides some status information: the resource version, availability, and relevant dates.
This resource was registered on: 2015 Feb 19 10:03:09ZThis resource description was last updated on: 2021 Oct 21 00:00:00Z
This section describes what the resource is, what it contains, and how it might be relevant.
Related Resources:
This section describes the data's coverage over the sky, frequency, and time.
This section describes the rights and usage information for this data.
This is service that does not comply with any IVOA standard but instead provides access to special capabilities specific to this resource.
This is a standard IVOA service that takes as input an ADQL or PQL query and returns tabular data.
This is a standard IVOA service that takes as input a position in the sky and a radius and returns catalog records with positions within that radius.
Cone search capability for table J/AJ/149/22/table1 (Pluto astrometry)
VERB=1
VERB=3
Developed with the support of the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement AST0122449 with the Johns Hopkins University The NAVO project is a member of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance
This NAVO Application is hosted by the Space Telescope Science Institute