Detecting small asteroids with the Space Surveillance Telescope

Ruprecht, J.; Stuart, J.; Woods, D.; Shah, R. Y.

doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2014.06.012

Cited by 16 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Space telescopes include WISE/NEOWISE (Wright et al 2010;Mainzer et al 2011bMainzer et al , 2014a and NEOSsat (Greenstreet et al 2012;Greenstreet & Gladman 2013). Among the ground-based surveys, Pan-STARRS (Denneau et al 2013), the Catalina Sky Survey (Vereš et al 2009), and the Space Surveillance Telescope survey (Ruprecht et al 2014) are operating, ATLAS (Tonry 2011) is under construction, and ADAM (Vereš et al 2014) is an active proposal. These systems are not covered here because they either represent the previous generation of NEO surveys (in the case of the NEOWISE, Pan-STARRS, and Catalina) or are aimed at different problems, such as late-stage warning of imminent Earth impact (in the case of ATLAS and ADAM).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing NEO Search Telescopes

Myhrvold

2016

PASP

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Multiple terrestrial and space-based telescopes have been proposed for detecting and tracking near-Earth objects (NEOs). Detailed simulations of the search performance of these systems have used complex computer codes that are not widely available, which hinders accurate cross-comparison of the proposals and obscures whether they have consistent assumptions. Moreover, some proposed instruments would survey infrared (IR) bands, whereas others would operate in the visible band, and differences among asteroid thermal and visible-light models used in the simulations further complicate like-to-like comparisons. I use simple physical principles to estimate basic performance metrics for the ground-based Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and three space-based instrumentsSentinel, NEOCam, and a Cubesat constellation. The performance is measured against two different NEO distributions, the Bottke et al. distribution of general NEOs, and the Veres et al. distribution of Earth-impacting NEO. The results of the comparison show simplified relative performance metrics, including the expected number of NEOs visible in the search volumes and the initial detection rates expected for each system. Although these simplified comparisons do not capture all of the details, they give considerable insight into the physical factors limiting performance. Multiple asteroid thermal models are considered, including FRM, NEATM, and a new generalized form of FRM. I describe issues with how IR albedo and emissivity have been estimated in previous studies, which may render them inaccurate. A thermal model for tumbling asteroids is also developed and suggests that tumbling asteroids may be surprisingly difficult for IR telescopes to observe.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparing NEO Search Telescopes

Myhrvold

2016

PASP

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“…See discussion in the text. SST/Lincoln: Ω, τ, and τ tot from Ruprecht et al (2014). θ PSF is estimated, including seeing.…”

Section: Scaling Laws For Streaked Asteroid Detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 2005, Spacewatch initiated a public Fast-Moving Object (FMO) program (McMillan et al 2005) that allowed public access to the survey's imagery on the internet so that members of the public could scan images and report detections of streaks. Ruprecht et al (2014). The indicated curves are from Mainzer et al (2011), Stuart (2001), Brown et al (2008), Harris (2008), and Harris (2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Small Near-Earth Asteroids in the Palomar Transient Factory Survey: A Real-Time Streak-detection System

Waszczak

Prince

Laher

et al. 2017

PASP

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Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) in the 1-100 meter size range are estimated to be ∼1,000 times more numerous than the ∼15,000 currently-catalogued NEAs, most of which are in the 0.5-10 kilometer size range. Impacts from 10-100 meter size NEAs are not statistically life-threatening but may cause significant regional damage, while 1-10 meter size NEAs with low velocities relative to Earth are compelling targets for space missions. We describe the implementation and initial results of a real-time NEA-discovery system specialized for the detection of small, high angular rate (visually-streaked) NEAs in Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) images. PTF is a 1.2-m aperture, 7.3-deg 2 field-of-view optical survey designed primarily for the discovery of extragalactic transients (e.g., supernovae) in 60-second exposures reaching ∼20.5 visual magnitude. Our real-time NEA discovery pipeline uses a machine-learned classifier to filter a large number of false-positive streak detections, permitting a human scanner to efficiently and remotely identify real asteroid streaks during the night. Upon recognition of a streaked NEA detection (typically within an hour of the discovery exposure), the scanner triggers follow-up with the same telescope and posts the observations to the Minor Planet Center for worldwide confirmation. We describe our ten initial confirmed discoveries, all small NEAs that passed 0.3-15 lunar distances from Earth. Lastly, we derive useful scaling laws for comparing streaked-NEA-detection capabilities of different surveys as a function of their hardware and survey-pattern characteristics. This work most directly informs estimates of the streak-detection capabilities of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF, planned to succeed PTF in 2017), which will apply PTF's current resolution and sensitivity over a 47-deg 2 field-of-view.

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“…however, optical tracking of distant probes, in L2 and on route to even farther interplanetary distances, has to deal with much fainter target magnitudes, a drawback that urges a substantial improvement in terms of telescope skills and especially of observing techniques to effectively assess our deep-space situational awareness (e.g. Mooney et al, 2006;Ruprecht et al, 2014;Woods et al, 2014). In this contribution we want therefore to briefly assess some technical issues (Sec.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optical tracking of deep-space spacecraft in Halo L2 orbits and beyond: The Gaia mission as a pilot case

Buzzoni

Altavilla

Galleti

2016

Advances in Space Research

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We tackle the problem of accurate optical tracking of distant man-made probes, on Halo orbit around the Earth-Sun libration point L2 and beyond, along interplanetary transfers. The improved performance of on-target tracking, especially when observing with small-class telescopes is assessed providing a general estimate of the expected S/N ratio in spacecraft detection. The on-going Gaia mission is taken as a pilot case for our analysis, reporting on fresh literature and original optical photometry and astrometric results.The probe has been located, along its projected nominal path, with quite high precision, within 0.13 ±0.09 arcsec, or 0.9 ±0.6 km. Spacecraft color appears to be red, with (V − R c ) = 1.1 ±0.2 and a bolometric correction to the R c band of (Bol − R c ) = −1.1 ±0.2 . The apparent magnitude, R c = 20.8 ±0.2 , is much fainter than originally expected. These features lead to suggest a lower limit for the Bond albedo α = 0.11 ±0.05 and confirm that incident Sun light is strongly reddened by Gaia through its on-board MLI blankets covering the solar shield.Relying on the Gaia figures, we found that VLT-class telescopes could yet be able to probe distant spacecraft heading Mars, up to 30 million km away, while a broader optical coverage of the forthcoming missions to Venus and Mars could be envisaged, providing to deal with space vehicles of minimum effective area A ≥ 10 6 cm 2 . In addition to L2 surveys, 2m-class telescopes could also effectively flank standard radar-ranging techniques in deep-space probe tracking along Earth's gravity-assist maneuvers for interplanetary missions.

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Detecting small asteroids with the Space Surveillance Telescope

Cited by 16 publications

References 12 publications

Comparing NEO Search Telescopes

Comparing NEO Search Telescopes

Small Near-Earth Asteroids in the Palomar Transient Factory Survey: A Real-Time Streak-detection System

Optical tracking of deep-space spacecraft in Halo L2 orbits and beyond: The Gaia mission as a pilot case

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