Discovery of Hundreds of Main-belt Asteroids with Synthetic Tracking of WISE Data

We analyze 1.5 million W3 Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) images acquired between 2010 January 7 and 2010 August 6 with the SALTAD synthetic tracking package to report astrometry of previously known and unknown main belt asteroids. We consider image stacks of 4–9 good-quality images, which yield average arc lengths of 17 hr and 7.1% of candidates having arc lengths greater than 24 hr. We search for viable stacks of good-quality images in patches across nearly the entire sky, excluding zones within 10° of the ecliptic poles and 20° of the Moon, yielding an effective search area that captures 39.8% of the sky. We detect and report astrometry for 8223 discovery candidates. Among those, 66 were identified by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center (MPC) as known objects, as demonstrated by successful links between our astrometry and previously submitted astrometry, leaving 8157 unidentified discovery candidates. Any of the discovery candidates that are not false positives are expected to be newly discovered asteroids that will ultimately be linked to additional observations. Our astrometry is expected to extend the observation arcs of hundreds of asteroids detected by Rubin/LSST or other surveys by more than 15 yr. We also recovered 66,511 known objects and submitted new observations to the MPC for the 13,575 known objects with two or more new detections not previously reported.