Asteroid orbital inversion using a virtual-observation Markov-chain Monte Carlo method

A novel virtual-observation Markov-chain Monte Carlo method (MCMC) is presented for the asteroid orbital inverse problem posed by small to moderate numbers of astrometric observations. In the method, the orbital-element proposal probability density is chosen to mimic the convolution of the a posteriori density by itself: first, random errors are simulated for each observation, resulting in a set of virtual observations; second, least-squares orbital elements are derived for the virtual observations using the Nelder–Mead downhill simplex method; third, repeating the procedure gives a difference between two sets of what can be called virtual least-squares elements; and, fourth, the difference obtained constitutes a symmetric proposal in a random-walk Metropolis–Hastings algorithm, avoiding the explicit computation of the proposal density. In practice, the proposals are based on a large number of pre-computed sets of orbital elements. Virtual-observation MCMC is thus based on the characterization of the phase-space volume of solutions before the actual MCMC sampling. Virtual-observation MCMC is compared to MCMC orbital ranging, a random-walk Metropolis–Hastings algorithm based on sampling with the help of Cartesian positions at two observation dates, in the case of the near-Earth asteroid (85640) 1998 OX4. In the present preliminary comparison, the methods yield similar results for a 9.1-day observational time interval extracted from the full current astrometry of the asteroid. In the future, both of the methods are to be applied to the astrometric observations of the Gaia mission.