@article{a5fd1fb5b4c442f39e61adc812aebcdb,
title = "The Size Distribution of Near-Earth Objects Larger Than 10 m",
abstract = "We analyzed data from the first year of a survey for Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that we are carrying out with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4 m Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. We implanted synthetic NEOs into the data stream to derive our nightly detection efficiency as a function of magnitude and rate of motion. Using these measured efficiencies and the solar system absolute magnitudes derived by the Minor Planet Center for the 1377 measurements of 235 unique NEOs detected, we directly derive, for the first time from a single observational data set, the NEO size distribution from 1 km down to 10 m. We find that there are 106.6 NEOs larger than 10 m. This result implies a factor of 10 fewer small NEOs than some previous results, though our derived size distribution is in good agreement with several other estimates.",
keywords = "minor planets, asteroids: general, surveys",
author = "Trilling, {D. E.} and F. Valdes and L. Allen and D. James and C. Fuentes and D. Herrera and T. Axelrod and J. Rajagopal",
note = "Funding Information: This project used data obtained with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was constructed by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) collaboration. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Funda{\c c}{\~a}o Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo {\`a} Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient{\'i}fico e Tecnol{\'o}gico and the Minist{\'e}rio da Ci{\^e}ncia, Tecnologia e Inovac{\~a}o, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The Collaborating Institutions are Argonne National Laboratory, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Cambridge, Centro de Investigaciones En{\'e}rgeticas, Medioam-bientales y Tecnol{\'o}gicas-Madrid, the University of Chicago, University College London, the DES-Brazil Consortium, the University of Edinburgh, the Eidgen{\"o}ssische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Z{\"u}rich, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut de Ci{\`e}ncies de l{\textquoteright}Espai (IEEC/CSIC), the Institut de F{\'i}sica d{\textquoteright}Altes Energies, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Ludwig-Maximilians Universit{\"a}t M{\"u}nchen and the associated Excellence Cluster Universe, the University of Michigan, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the University of Nottingham, the Ohio State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Portsmouth, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, the University of Sussex, and Texas A&M University. Facility: Blanco(DECam). Funding Information: We thank Peter Brown and Alan Harris (DLR) for many useful conversations and Steve Chelsey and an anonymous AAS statistics reviewer for useful comments that improved this paper. We thank the NOAO TAC and Director Dave Silva for granting Survey status for this program. We also thank Dave Silva and NOAO for acquiring the VR filter that we use in our survey. We gratefully acknowledge the hard work and help that Tim Spahr and Gareth Williams of the Minor Planet Center have provided and continue to provide in support of our DECam NEO survey. DET carried out some of the work on this paper while being hosted at Lowell Observatory. This work was supported in part by NASA award NNX12AG13G. This work is based on observations at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO Prop. 2013B-0536; PI: L. Allen), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.",
year = "2017",
month = oct,
doi = "10.3847/1538-3881/aa8036",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "154",
journal = "Astronomical Journal",
issn = "0004-6256",
publisher = "IOP Publishing Ltd.",
number = "4",
}