* Astronomy

Title: AcuA: the AKARI/IRC Mid-infrared Asteroid Survey
Authors: Fumihiko Usui, Daisuke Kuroda, Thomas G. Mueller, Sunao Hasegawa, Masateru Ishiguro, Takafumi Ootsubo, Daisuke Ishihara, Hirokazu Kataza, Satoshi Takita, Shinki Oyabu, Munetaka Ueno, Hideo Matsuhara, Takashi Onaka

We present the results of an unbiased asteroid survey in the mid-infrared wavelength with the Infrared Camera (IRC) onboard the Japanese infrared satellite AKARI. About 20% of the point source events recorded in the AKARI All-Sky Survey observations are not used for the IRC Point Source Catalogue (IRC-PSC) in its production process because of the lack of multiple detection by position. Asteroids, which are moving objects on the celestial sphere, remain in these "residual events". We identify asteroids out of the residual events by matching them with the positions of known asteroids. For the identified asteroids, we calculate the size and albedo based on the Standard Thermal Model. Finally we have a brand-new catalogue of asteroids, named the Asteroid Catalogue Using Akari (AcuA), which contains 5,120 objects, about twice as many as the IRAS asteroid catalogue. The catalogue objects comprise 4,953 main belt asteroids, 58 near Earth asteroids, and 109 Jovian Trojan asteroids. The catalogue will be publicly available via the Internet.

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