Asteroids contribute siginificantly to the general look of the infrared sky, much more than at visible wavelengths. As infrared space mission are more and more sensitive, it is important to test the impact of asteroids on these observations.
We used the Statistical Asteroid Model-I (Tedesco et al. 2005) and
a simple thermal model (Lang, 1992) to calculate the
brightness of 1.9 million asteroids from mid-infrared to
submillimetre wavelengths, at various dates/solar elongations.
Using this model, we calculated expected number densities
and confusion noise values, which are crucial parameters
for the detectors of present and future space missions
(e.g. PACS and SPIRE aborad Herschel, Planck).