High-inclination atens are indeed rare

Abstract

A recent publication by the Near-Earth Object (NEOWISE) team (Mainzer et al.) using data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer compared the spacecraft's detected near-Earth asteroid subpopulation orbital element distributions to those expected from the Bottke et al. NEO orbital model. They found a discrepency between the detected and expected Aten inclination distribution. We show that the more recent NEO orbital distribution model by Greenstreet et al., when biased using the NEOWISE detection biases, gives a better match to the NEOWISE detections for the Aten (a < 1.0 AU, Q > 0.983 AU) population in semimajor axis (a), eccentricity (e), and inclination (i) than the Bottke et al. model. A Kolmogorov-Smirnov test gives the probability of drawing the NEOWISE detections from the biased Bottke et al. model as not rejectable (at >99% confidence) for the Aten semimajor axis distribution, but is rejectable at such a high level of confidence for the Aten eccentricity and inclination distributions. For all three orbital element distributions, the biased Greenstreet et al. model provides an acceptable match to the NEOWISE Aten detections. The deficiency in the previous model is likely due to the numerical integration's accuracy having broken down in the high-speed regime for planetary encounters near the Sun, an effect which the newer model does not suffer, and thus likely is the model of preference for perihelia q < 1.0 AU. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.