Speakers
Description
The MPC NEO Confirmation Page (NEOCP) plays a crucial role in the discovery and follow up of Near-Earth Objects. Once a candidate new object has been observed and observations have been posted to the Minor Planet Center (MPC), the MPC’s aim is to process the object in the shortest amount of time. The goal is to give the community a reasonable and reliable area in the sky in which the object can be followed up and confirmed. When the entire process is successfully completed, the object gets a provisional designation and observations and orbits are published through a minor planet circular. Most of the time, this process is smooth and completely automated. We will give a brief introduction on how the internal MPC pipeline works for new discoveries and follow up, and demonstrate the rapid turnaround in the case of 2022 EB5, the object that impacted the Earth in March 2022.
There are cases in which problems or latencies appear, slowing down the entire follow up and discovery procedure. We will present our recent developments on improving latencies and accuracy of the NEO discovery. We will show where the bottlenecks appear and how we plan to overcome them.
We will also present our plans for the future, when the MPC will need to ingest hundreds of thousands of observations per night from the Vera Rubin Observatory and the NEO Surveyor mission.
