arXiv:2310.12918astro-ph.EP
The Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission
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Abstract
The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission is a NASA observatory designed to discover and characterize near-Earth asteroids and comets. The mission's primary objective is to find the majority of objects large enough to cause severe regional impact damage ($>$140 m in effective spherical diameter) within its five-year baseline survey. Operating at the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, the mission will survey to within 45 degrees of the Sun in an effort to find the objects in the most Earth-like orbits. The survey cadence is optimized to provide observational arcs long enough to reliably distinguish near-Earth objects from more distant small bodies that cannot pose an impact hazard. Over the course of its survey, NEO Surveyor will discover $\sim$200,000 - 300,000 new NEOs down to sizes as small as $\sim$10 m and thousands of comets, significantly improving our understanding of the probability of an Earth impact over the next century.
I work on the NASA NEO Surveyor project (and have helped out a lot on the WISE/NEOWISE mission, which found a lot of asteroids). I create and run simulations of asteroid detections, which ends up being mostly orbit calculations. In the next few years the rate of detections of…
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