Catalogs of potential detections of asteroids

There are about 800000 asteroids and 2000 comets included in the SSOSS, available through ESASky, providing both targeted and serendipitous observations. For this first release, three missions were chosen: XMM-Newton, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and Herschel Observatory. We present a catalog listing all potential detections of asteroids within estimated limiting magnitude or flux limit in Herschel, XMM-Newton, and HST archival imaging data, including 909 serendipitous detections in Herschel images, 985 in XMM-Newton Optical Monitor camera images, and over 32000 potential serendipitous detections in HST images.

We also present a case study: the analysis of the thermal properties of Psyche from four serendipitous Herschel detections, combined with previously published thermal IR measurements. We see strong evidence for an unusual drop in (hemispherical spectral) emissivity, from 0.9 at 100um down to about 0.6 at 350um, followed by a possible but not well-constrained increase towards 500um, comparable to what was found for Vesta.

The combined thermal data set puts a strong constraint on Psyche's thermal inertia (between 20 to 80J/m^2^/s^1/2^/K) and favors an intermediate to low level surface roughness (below 0.4 for the rms of surface slopes). Conclusions: Using the example of Psyche, we show how the SSOSS provides fast access to observations of SSOs from the ESA astronomical archives, regardless of whether the particular object was the actual target.

This greatly simplifies the task of searching, identifying, and retrieving such data for scientific analysis.