Near-Earth Asteroids Astrometry with Gaia and Beyond

Abstract

4 p.International audienceGaia is an astrometric mission that will be launched in 2012 and will observe a large number of Solar System Objects down to magnitude 20. The Solar System Science goal is to map thousand of Main Belt Asteroids (MBAs), Near Earth Objects (NEOs) (including comets) and also planetary satellites with the principal purpose of orbital determination (better than 5 mas astrometric precision), determination of asteroid mass, spin properties and taxonomy. Besides, Gaia will be able to discover a few objects, in particular NEOs in the region down the solar elongation (45°) which are harder to detect with current ground-based surveys