The Isolated Tracklet File

The ITF is an ever changing list of unlinked tracklets. To the date of December 2021 it contains about 9 million observations grouped in more than 2.5 million tracklets. This file is mainly composed of observations from Pan-STARRS1 (F51) and Catalina (G96), with more than 4 and 2 millions of observations respectively. Although the observations from these two observatories dominate the ITF, in this file there are also observations from more than 700 different observatories. Thus the quality of the observations are different, therefore it is necessary to know if the linkage methods are strong enough to deal with the astrometric errors of each observatory.

In this project we are focused on the ITF observations made by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope, which contribute for almost 50% of the total number and are among the most accurate in this file. We take only the tracklets with 3 or more observations, which are currently 1252187