Paper

The Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission

Liu, X, Kelley, Michael S, Sonnett, S, Kim, Yoonyoung, Masci, Frank J, Mainzer, A K, Buratti, Bonnie J, Surace, Jason A, Fernandez, Y R, McMurtry, Craig W, Dahlen, D, Furfaro, Roberto, Masiero, Joseph R, Ressler, Michael E, Vaquero, Mar, Zengilowski, Gregory R, Bauer, J M, Schambeau, C A, Cutri, R M, Abell, Paul A, Eisenhardt, Peter R M, Bottke, William, Satpathy, Akash, Hoffman, T L, Marsh, K A, Lawler, Christopher R, Grav, Tommy, Spahr, Timothy B, Lilly, Eva, Wright, E L, NEO Surveyor Mission Team, Lennon Reinhart, J Davy Kirkpatrick, Marocco, Federico, Pourrahmani, Milad, Carey, Sean J, Cotto-Figueroa, D

2023

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Asteroid missions / Comets / Impact damage / Lagrangian equilibrium points / Near-Earth Objects