Summary: Multi-night tracklets inherently enable the recovery of isolated single detections on a night by forming tracklets accross different nights thereby increasing the number of objects that can be found compared to single-night tracklet formation. Additionally, very distant objects greater than ~150 AU appear functionally stationary over a single night thus no single-night tracklets can be created for them. Multi-night tracklets, however, allow sufficient separation for these slow movers which enables the recovery of extremely distant objects that single-night tracklets cannot see. Due to this slow on-sky motion, the radial search area for multi-night tracklet formation for TNOs is comparable to the search area for single-night MBA tracklet formation, thus a combinatorial explosion is avoided. Finally, multi-night tracklets provide a superior representation of an object’s orbit compared to single-night tracklets due to their reduced plane measurement error which produces better hypothesis orbits and enables tighter clustering tolerances. Using an arbitrary two week selection of DP0.3 data we count 27.7% more recoverable objects (those having at least 3 nights of detections) with multi-night tracklets than single-night tracklets (2,444 vs. 1,914) and HelioLinC recovers 2,443 (99.96%) of them.
Full Study: https://www.benengebreth.org/dynamic-sky/distant-tnos-multi-night-tracklets/
Caveats: These are very preliminary results for one arbitrary week of data in the DP0.3 dataset. They are not peer-reviewed nor are they official Rubin estimates. These are just the results of initial tests with an experimental algorithm by an independent researcher.