The Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission
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 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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2310.12918,
title = {The Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission},
author = {A. K. Mainzer and Joseph R. Masiero and Paul A. Abell and J. M. Bauer and William Bottke and Bonnie J. Buratti and Sean J. Carey and D. Cotto-Figueroa and R. M. Cutri and D. Dahlen and Peter R. M. Eisenhardt and 6 Y. R. Fernandez and Roberto Furfaro and Tommy Grav and T. L. Hoffman and Michael S. Kelley and Yoonyoung Kim and J. Davy Kirkpatrick and Christopher R. Lawler and Eva Lilly and X. Liu and Federico Marocco and K. A. Marsh and Frank J. Masci and Craig W. McMurtry and Milad Pourrahmani and Lennon Reinhart and Michael E. Ressler and Akash Satpathy and C. A. Schambeau and S. Sonnett and Timothy B. Spahr and Jason A. Surace and Mar Vaquero and E. L. Wright and Gregory R. Zengilowski and NEO Surveyor Mission Team},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.12918},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
accepted to PSJ