Validation of the Survey Simulator Tool for the NEO Surveyor Mission Using NEOWISE Data

Creators: Masiero, Joseph R.; Dahlen, Dar W.; Mainzer, Amy K.; Bottke, William F.; Bragg, Jennifer C.; Bauer, James M.; Grav, Tommy

Abstract

The Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor) mission has a requirement to find two-thirds of the potentially hazardous asteroids larger than 140 m in size. In order to determine the mission's expected progress toward this goal during design and testing, as well as the actual progress during the survey, a simulation tool has been developed to act as a consistent and quantifiable yardstick. We test that the survey simulation software is correctly predicting on-sky positions and thermal infrared fluxes by using it to reproduce the published measurements of asteroids from the NEOWISE mission. We then extended this work to find previously unreported detections of known near-Earth asteroids in the NEOWISE data archive, a search that resulted in 21,661 recovery detections, including 1166 objects that had no previously reported NEOWISE observations. These efforts demonstrate the reliability of the NEO Surveyor Survey Simulator tool and the perennial value of searchable image and source catalog archives for extending our knowledge of the small bodies of the solar system.

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

We thank the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on this manuscript that improved the text. 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 joint project of the University of Arizona and Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the Planetary Science Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This publication makes use of data products from the 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. This research has made use of data and services provided by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Software References

This research has made use of the astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018, 2022), numpy (van der Walt et al. 2011; Harris et al. 2020), scipy (Virtanen et al. 2020), and matplotlib (Hunter 2007) Python packages.

Data Availability

We used the following data products from IRSA:

1. WISE All-Sky Single-Exposure (L1b) Source Table (WISE Team 2020d),

2. WISE All-Sky Single-Exposure (L1b) Frame Metadata Table (WISE Team 2020c),

3. WISE All-Sky Four-band Single-Exposure Images (NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive 2020),

4. WISE Three-Band Cryo Single-Exposure (L1b) Source Table (WISE Team 2020g), (END)

5. WISE Three-Band Cryo Single-Exposure (L1b) Frame Metadata Table (WISE Team 2020f),

6. WISE Three-Band Cryo L1b Images (WISE Team 2020e),

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