The Pan-STARRS-1 telescope in Maui, Hawaii performed a multi-purpose survey of the of the sky north of -30° declination from 2010 to 2014. From 2014 onwards, the main focus of Pan-STARRS has been a survey of the sky for Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), funded by the NASA Planetary Defense Program. With the addition of the second telescope, Pan-STARRS has become one of the leading surveys for...
The Catalina Sky Survey is a world leader in the discovery and astrometric follow-up of near-Earth objects (NEOs) As such, we continuously update and refine our algorithms to improve our operations. Here, we present three recent enhancements to the Catalina Sky Survey operations model in both discovery survey and targeted follow-up.
First, we have recently, in collaboration with the ATLAS...
The ATLAS telescopes have largely operated using a traditional discovery mode in which data from each telescope are processed separately and NEOS are discovered from a series of four "quad" observations from one telescope. Since they operate independently, sky coverage (and therefore NEO discovery) are subject to losses from poor weather; for example, a quad of observations can be spoiled by a...
To detect unknown and potentially dangerous asteroids, ESA’s Planetary Defence Office prepares the operation of a network of so called FLYEYE telescopes.
ESA’s Test Bed Telescope (TBT) project is laying the groundwork for the efficient operation of these telescopes. The project consists of two identical telescopes: one located at ESA’s ground station in Cebreros, West of Madrid in Spain, and...
2022 EB5, 2023 CX1 and 2024 BX1: these are the three recent imminent impactor discoveries from the Piszkesteto Mountain Station of the Konkoly Observatory. They make up about a quarter of all known such events since 2008 and one may ask what makes our survey sensitive to these little impactors. In this talk we describe our recently upgraded survey instrumentation, outline the observational...
We simulated the operations of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in observing 5,000 virtual impacting asteroids over a range of size bins, whose orbits were chosen to impact Earth over a period of 50 years. We used the Sorcha package to simulate the observations of these impactors for the planned 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time. We performed running orbit fits for the state vector and...
The airburst event over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 caused over 1,400 injuries and $30 million in property damage. This object was not tracked until it entered the Earth’s atmosphere, too late for any disaster response, partly because of its small (~20 meter-diameter) size, but also because it approached from interior to Earth’s orbit, obscured by the Sun’s brightness. The Chelyabinsk...
Keywords: Near-Earth asteroids, NEOCP, MPC, impactors
The Minor Planet Center (MPC) serves as the single worldwide location for tracking and cataloging asteroids, natural irregular satellites of the major planets, and comets, making it central to planetary defense efforts. Operated at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA, under the auspices of the International...
Over the past two decades, nearly all Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) have been discovered mostly by dedicated surveys through the use of preselected candidates posted to the Minor Planet Center's (MPC) Near-Earth Object Confirmation Page (NEOCP). Rapid follow-up observations from the astronomical community typically allow for the designation of new NEOs within a few days. As of today, more than...
The motion of an asteroid over its hour long ''tracklet'' (a short sequence of observations) is often used to estimate the likelihood of it being interesting [1] -- that is, not exhibiting the motion typical of main belt asteroids. This is done by computing a numerical score, 0-100, which must be >65 for the object to be considered a Near-Earth Object (NEO) candidate.
However, there are...
A common question from the public is: How many dangerous asteroids could potentially hit the Earth? Our response usually starts by mentioning that the number is size-dependent, because while there are numerous small asteroids, they pose less threat to life on Earth.
We have agreed to use two limits: 1km objects for global catastrophes and 140m objects for regional events.
In the last 25...
Impact risk is normally quantified by summing the product of the probability of an event and some measure of its consequences over the set of all possible events. The probability factor is considered to be more objective and is based on the size frequency distribution of NEOs and an implicit assumption of randomness, which can be described as “stochastic catastrophism”. Impact frequency does...
NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission is an infrared observatory planned to launch no earlier than September 2027 that is designed to discover and characterize asteroids and comets. Its main objective is to identify those objects that are large enough (>140 m in effective spherical diameter) to cause severe regional damage from impact. The observatory will operate at the Sun-Earth L1...