[P-PS03] Small Solar System Bodies: New perspectives on the origin and evolution of the Solar System

[PPS03-P12] A deep analysis for New Horizons’ TNO search images

*Fumi Yoshida^1,2, Toshifumi Yanagisawa³, Takashi Ito^4,2, Hirohisa Kurosaki³, Makoto Yoshikawa³, Kohki Kamiya³, Ji-an Jiang^5,4, Alan Stern⁶ (1.University of Occupational and Environmental Health, Japan, 2.Chiba Institute of Technology, 3.Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, 4.National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, 5.University of Science and Technology of China, 6.Southwest Research Institute)

Keywords:trans-Neptunian objects, ground-based observation, planetary exploration

Observation data sets acquired by the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) on the Subaru Telescope for the New Horizons mission target search were analyzed using JAXA's FPGA-based Moving Object Detection System. This JAXA's detection system has been used to detect fast-moving objects, such as space debris and near-Earth asteroids, in an ideal image set observed at precise and regular time intervals. In this study, we had adjust the system to detect slow-moving objects, such as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) in datasets, such as the Subaru Telescope images that are not intended to be acquired at precisely timed intervals. The New Horizons target search observations took continuous images of one field of view of the HSC for half a night. This cadence of observations makes it easy to match the observation dataset with JAXA's moving object detection system. Observations for the New Horizons mission began in May 2020 and are still ongoing, but here we have used the dataset observed between May 2020 and June 2021, which has passed the proprietary period and is already available to the public. This analysis was carried out in a completely different way to that of the New Horizons mission science team did (Fraser et al. 2024 in preparation). We detected 84 TNO candidates in the June 2020 and June 2021 datasets, when the observation field was close to the opposition. Two of these were newly discovered objects in this study, additional discoveries from Fraser et al. (2024).
This poster mainly describes the analysis methods.