Orbit determination with very short arcs. I: Admissible regions (Q1766264)

In the last years an enormous increase in the discoveries of new asteroids took place mainly due to automated surveys like Spacewatch, LINEAR, LONEOS, Catalina etc. One of the common disadvantage of these surveys is a short time span of observations (too short arc -- TSA) for a full orbit determination. The standard orbit determination procedure (Gauss method followed by least squares with differential corrections) is not suitable for such TSA observations (either Gauss method fails, or the differential correction does not converge). In this article an attempt is done to find a solution of this problem by using the existence of a large database of TSA observations.