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gaia data release 3 documentation

19 Performance verification

19.3 The Solar System survey

Gaia DR3 is the first release to provide the community with a large sample of observations for more than 150 000 Solar System objects, including asteroids and natural planetary satellites. The release contains astrometry (over 23 million epochs), photometry, along with average reflectance spectra of 60 518 asteroids. In Tanga et al. (2023), the processing of Solar System objects is explained, and some examples of scientific applications are given to illustrate the quality of the data. As a test for the astrometric quality of asteroid positions, the residuals with respect to the fit of an osculating orbit are analysed.

The orbits computed in this process are provided in the sso_orbits table. This table contains the state vector and the osculating elements for 154 741 asteroids. See Tanga et al. (2023) for details.