Speaker
Description
The powerful method of stellar occultations is an unbeatable technique uniquely approaching, in some aspects, the performances of planetary space missions. It allows to derive, from ground using small aperture telescopes, asteroids' positions at Gaia-level accuracy [F22], thus extending the time- coverage of Gaia ESA mission. Moreover, it allows to determine the physical size of these objects and probe their environ looking for satellites.
Finally, successful stellar occultation campaigns rely heavily on good networks of citizen scientists across the Globe.
Recently, both DART (NASA) and Hera (ESA) planetary defence missions have shown successful inter-agency, and even agency-industry collaborations when it comes to planetary defence.
In this talk, we present the important contribution of citizen scientists across the globe to support planetary science and planetary defence missions through the orbital (astrometry) and physical (size, shape) characterisation, e.g. Apophis and Didymos. Moreover, we go over some lessons learnt from organising campaigns for occultations by sub-km sized objects, such as Apophis [D23, S23], and the Didymos-Dimorphos system [D23, M24, and abstract 115 by Chesley et al. PDC 2025].
References
[F22] Ferreira, J.F., Tanga, P., Spoto, F., Machado, P., and Herald, D.: 2022, Astronomy and Astrophysics, 658, A73. doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202141753.
[S23] Souami, D., Desmars, J., Tanga, P., Tsiganis, K., de Pater, I., Hsu, Y.M., and, ...: 2023, Asteroids, Comets, Meteors Conference, 2851, 2099.
[D23] Desmars, J., Souami, D., Vavilov, D., Hsu, H.M., De Pater, I., and Hestroffer, D.: 2023, Asteroids, Comets, Meteors Conference, {\bf 2851}, 2376.
[M24] Makadia, R., Chesley, S.R., Farnocchia, D., Naidu, S.P., Souami, D., Tanga, P., and, ...: 2024, The Planetary Science Journal 5, 38. doi:10.3847/PSJ/ad1bce.