Speakers
Description
Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) has discovered three of the five imminent impactors detected to date. While the principal focus of CSS and other contemporary near-Earth object (NEO) surveys is to discover unknown larger members of the NEO population, CSS has demonstrated sensitivity to some smaller, nearby objects including imminent impactors during certain phases of their final approach. I will present some attributes of CSS’s instrumentation, survey design and operations that improve the chances of detecting and alerting on small NEOs prior to Earth impact.
Initial detection of an imminent impactor is only the first step in its discovery. The NEO-observing community should quickly be alerted to the impact, to determine the precise time and place of impact, to understand and communicate any hazards, and to maximize the scientific return of a predicted impact event. To assist with follow-up planning, CSS has recently deployed a tool for NEO observers called NEOfixer. NEOfixer aims to optimally improve the NEO catalog by providing instrument-specific prioritized lists of targets to observers, guided by planetary defense concerns. NEOfixer weights object importance and confidence alongside observational cost, benefit, and urgency. Coordination across multiple follow-up sites is facilitated by ingesting targeting information and observation status from participating observatories, and adjusting stations’ priority scores in real-time. NEOfixer also provides a method for measuring the benefit of any and all NEO observations. I will discuss how NEOfixer can encourage and coordinate observations of the next imminent impactor, and will present preliminary results outlining NEOfixer’s assessment of historical observation benefit.
