Near Earth Asteroids with measurable Yarkovsky effect

Understand

We seek evidence of the Yarkovsky effect among Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) by measuring the Yarkovsky-related orbital drift from the orbital fit.

• To prevent the occurrence of unreliable detections we employ a high precision dynamical model, including the Newtonian attraction of 16 massive asteroids and the planetary relativistic terms, and a suitable astrometric data treatment.
• We find 21 NEAs whose orbital fits show a measurable orbital drift with a signal to noise ratio (SNR) greater than 3.
• The best determination is for asteroid (101955) 1999 RQ36, resulting in the recovery of one radar apparition and an orbit improvement by two orders of magnitude.