Nonlinear impact monitoring: 2-dimensional sampling

When a new Near Earth Asteroid is discovered, it is important to know if there is the possibility of an impact with the Earth in the near future. In these last years second generation software for impact monitoring (CLOMON2 and SENTRY) have been developed and the performances have been significantly increased in comparison to the earlier, simpler and solitary system CLOMON. The two systems use the Line Of Variations (LOV) approach: they sample the LOV, an 1-dimensional subspace, to perform the sampling of the 6-dimensional confidence region. This approach is very useful when the confidence region is elongated and thin, that is an eigenvalue of the covariance matrix is much bigger than the others. When the observed arc is short (1(°) or less), usually for asteroids observed for few nights, the confidence region is like a flat disk and we propose to use a 2-dimensional sampling. We triangulate the admissible region in the (r, dot r) plane, using the nodes of triangulations as Virtual Asteroids (VAs). After orbit propagation we project the VAs and the triangulation on the Target Plane (TP) of a given epoch to study the existence of a Virtual Impactor (VI) and complex dynamical behaviors such as folds.