Asteroid Families Portal

Proper Elements Catalogs

The catalogs contain proper orbital elements of numbered asteroids and main-belt comets computed numerically by means of a synthetic theory by Knežević & Milani (2000,2003).

There are however some differences between the procedure proposed by aforementioned authors and the one used to produce the catalogs available here:

Orbits of all asteroids are numerically propagated for 10 Myr
All numerical integrations are made within the same dynamical model
All proper elements calculations are performed using the same version of the software

Asteroid proper orbital elements (available for 1,052,382 objects in total, as of October 2022):

Numbered asteroids (596,526 objects):

afp.num.pro (file size: ~63MB)
afp.num.sig (file size: ~50MB)

Multi-opposition asteroids (455,856 objects):

afp.mult.pro (file size: ~48MB)
afp.mult.sig (file size: ~38MB)

Proper orbital elements for active main-belt asteroids:

Information on the format of the catalogs:

The format of files containing proper elements:

Column 1: Asteroid number/designation
Column 2: Absolute magnitude (Note: The flag '99.99' is used when the information is not available.)
Column 3: Proper semi-major axis [au]
Column 4: Proper eccentricity
Column 5: Sine of proper inclination
Column 6: Proper frequency of mean motion [deg/yr]
Column 7: Proper frequency of perihelion longitude [arcsec/yr]
Column 8: Proper frequency of nodal longitude [arcsec/yr]
Column 9: Lyapunov time [kyr]
Column10: Integration time span [Myr]

The format of files containing standard deviations of proper elements residuals:

Column 1: Asteroid number/designation
Column 2: Root-mean-square error of proper semi-major axis
Column 3: Root-mean-square error of eccentricity
Column 4: Root-mean-square error of sine of proper inclination
Column 5: Root-mean-square error of proper of mean motion frequency [deg/yr]
Column 6: Root-mean-square error of proper perihelion longitude frequency [arcsec/yr]
Column 7: Root-mean-square error of proper nodal longitude frequency [arcsec/yr]

Referencing the proper elements dataset:

If your publication is based on the asteroid proper elements dataset, please cite the following work as a general reference for the AFP portal:

Bojan Novaković, David Vokrouhlický, Federica Spoto and David Nesvorný: Asteroid Families: properties, recent advances and future opportunities 2022, Celest Mech Dyn Astro, 134, id. 34

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