LAMBDA News
Infrared Astronomical Satellite, IRAS
The IRAS Asteroid
and Comet Survey is the largest, most uniform and least biased
survey ever conducted of asteroids and comets. Because the
emission observed is thermal, the present survey is not plagued
by the albedo bias to which visible wavelength analogues are
susceptible. Asteroids and comets are bright infrared sources,
particularly at 25 microns.
The IRAS hours and weeks-confirmation strategy was developed
to discriminate against moving sources. However, to provide
data for the study of the properties of known and newly-discovered
asteroids, all sources with infrared colors typical of Solar
system objects were recorded in auxiliary files at both seconds
and hours-confirmation, with an emphasis on completeness.
In addition to data for 25 comets and 1811 known asteroids, a search for sources moving across the sky more rapidly than about 1' per hour resulted in the discovery of six new comets, an extensive cometary debris trail, and two Apollo asteroids, one of which may be an extinct cometary nucleus. Asteroids and comets moving more slowly than 1' per hour would hours-confirm and thus reside in the Working Survey Database.
Thirteen Asteroid and Comet data products were generated, of which four - the IRAS Asteroid Catalog, the Asteroid Statistics Catalog, the Low-Resolution Spectrometer Spectra of Selected Asteroids, and the IRAS Comet Catalog - are bound together with the Asteroid and Comet Explanatory Supplement and a User's Guide to the data products (see reference). The complete set of data products is listed in Table 8-1 of that volume. LAMBDA holds seven data products:
- Catalog of IRAS Asteroid Sightings;
- IRAS Asteroid Catalog;
- Asteroid Statistics database;
- IRAS Comet Catalog;
- Asteroid Names and Pointers database;
- Asteroid Ground-Based database;
- Rejected Sightings database.
Reference:
The IRAS Asteroid and Comet Survey, 1986, ed. D. L. Matson,
JPL D-3698 (Pasadena: JPL).
Version and release date: 1.0, 1986 Oct
