Asteroid Confusions with Extremely Large Telescopes

Asteroids can be considered as sources of contamination of point sources and also sources of confusion noise, depending whether their presence is detected in the image or their flux is under the detection limit. We estimate that at low ecliptic latitudes, ~10,000--20,000 asteroids/sq. degree will be detected with an E-ELT like telescope, while by the end of Spitzer and Herschel missions, infrared space observatories will provide ~100,000 serendipitous asteroid detections. The detection and identification of asteroids is therefore an important step in survey astronomy.

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