The Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission

Creators: Mainzer, A. K.; Masiero, J. R.; Abell, Paul A.; Bauer, J. M.; Bottke, William; Buratti, Bonnie J.; Carey, Sean J.; Cotto-Figueroa, D.; Cutri, R. M.; Dahlen, D.; Eisenhardt, Peter R. M.; Fernandez, Y. R.; Furfaro, Roberto; Grav, Tommy; Hoffman, T. L.; Kelley, Michael S.; Kim, Yoonyoung; Kirkpatrick, J. Davy¹; Lawler, Christopher R.; Lilly, Eva; Liu, X.; Marocco, Federico; Marsh, K. A.; Masci, Frank J.; McMurtry, Craig W.; Pourrahmani, Milad; Reinhart, Lennon; Ressler, Michael E.; Satpathy, Akash; Schambeau, C. A.; Sonnett, S.; Spahr, Timothy B.; Surace, Jason A.; Vaquero, Mar; Wright, E. L.; Zengilowski, Gregory R.; NEO Surveyor Mission Team

1. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission is a NASA Observatory designed to discover and characterize 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 5 yr baseline survey. Operating at the Sun–Earth L1 Lagrange point, the mission will survey to within 45° of the Sun in an effort to find objects in the most Earth-like orbits. The survey cadence is optimized to provide observational arcs long enough to distinguish near-Earth objects from more distant small bodies that cannot pose an impact hazard reliably. Over the course of its survey, NEO Surveyor will discover ∼200,000–300,000 new NEOs down to sizes as small as ∼10 m and thousands of comets, significantly improving our understanding of the probability of an Earth impact over the next century.

Copyright and License

© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

This publication makes use of data products from NEO Surveyor, which is a joint project of the University of Arizona and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We gratefully acknowledge the services and support of the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This publication also makes use of data products from NEOWISE, which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/University of Arizona, funded by the Planetary Science Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and operated by the California Institute of Technology.

We are extremely grateful to our anonymous referees; their comments have materially improved the clarity and quality of this manuscript.

Facilities

WISE - Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, NEOWISE - , IRSA - , and MPC -

Data Availability

WISE All-Sky 4-band Single-Exposure Images: https://www.ipac.caltech.edu/doi/irsa/10.26131/IRSA152.

AllWISE Source Catalog: https://www.ipac.caltech.edu/doi/irsa/10.26131/IRSA1.

NEOWISE-R Single Exposure (L1b) Source Table: https://www.ipac.caltech.edu/doi/irsa/10.26131/IRSA144.

Software References

astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2022), scipy (Virtanen et al. 2020), numpy (Harris et al. 2020), SPICE (Acton 1996), spiceypy (Annex et al. 2020), and Blackbird (Lawler et al. 2020)

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes