A Strategy for Finding Near Earth Objects with the SDSS Telescope
Abstract
We present a detailed observational strategy for finding Near Earth Objects (NEOs) with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope. We investigate strategies in normal, unbinned mode as well as binning the CCDs 2x2 or 3x3, which affects the sky coverage rate and the limiting apparent magnitude. We present results from 1 month, 3 year and 10 year simulations of such surveys. For each cadence and binning mode, we evaluate the possibility of achieving the Spaceguard goal of detecting 90% of 1 km NEOs (absolute magnitude H <= 18 for an albedo of 0.1). We find that an unbinned survey is most effective at detecting H <= 20 NEOs in our sample. However, a 3x3 binned survey reaches the Spaceguard Goal after only seven years of operation. As the proposed large survey telescopes (PanStarss; LSST) are at least 5-10 years from operation, an SDSS NEO survey could make a significant contribution to the detection and photometric characterization of the NEO population.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0401438,
title = {A Strategy for Finding Near Earth Objects with the SDSS Telescope},
author = {Sean N. Raymond and Oliver J. Fraser and Arti Garg and Suzanne L. Hawley and Robert Jedicke and Gajus Miknaitis and Thomas Quinn and Constance M. Rockosi and Christopher W. Stubbs and Scott F. Anderson and Craig J. Hogan and Zeljko Ivezic and Robert H. Lupton and Andrew A. West and Howard Brewington and J. Brinkmann and Michael Harvanek and Scot J. Kleinman and Jurek Krzesinski and Dan Long and Eric H. Neilsen and Peter R. Newman and Atsuko Nitta and Stephanie A. Snedden},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0401438},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Accepted by AJ -- 12 pages, 11 figures