Detecting Earth-Impacting Asteroids with the Pan-STARRS Prototype Telescope

Details Detecting Earth-Impacting Asteroids with the Pan-STARRS Prototype Telescope Detecting Earth-Impacting Asteroids with the Pan-STARRS Prototype Telescope

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.5205g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #52.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.492

Mathematics

Probability

Scientific paper

We present a simulation of the detection of Earth-impacting asteroids with the single-telescope prototype of the Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS). To get realistic results, a synthetic population of 110,000 asteroids impacting the Earth over a period of 100 years was derived from the Bottke et al. (2002, Icarus 156, p. 399) near-Earth-object (NEO) model. The synthetic population is run through the Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System (MOPS), which generates synthetic detections for the synthetic impactor orbits according to the cadence, limiting magnitude, field size, etc. Using the synthetic detections, MOPS then performs linking, orbit determination, precovery, attribution, and orbit identification. MOPS also computes the minimum orbital intersection distance (MOID) with respect to Earth's orbit for all NEO orbits. Using the results, we estimate the fraction of impactors to be detected as a function of their sizes and orbits. With the same parameterization, we also estimate the warning time, which we define as the interval between the date of the first MOID estimate having a minimum value smaller than a predefined upper limit for the Earth's capture cross section, and the impact date. MOPS will only compute orbits and MOIDs for observation sets spanning >= 3 nights over > 8 days which, combined with the astrometric accuracy, will lead to 95% of the impactors being classified as potentially hazardous objects (MOID < 0.05 AU) already when the first, nominal MOID estimate is computed. Using the current estimates for the size-impact-frequency distributions of asteroids and fireballs, we estimate that the maximum probability that the Pan-STARRS prototype will both detect and compute an orbit for an asteroid impacting during the next century is about 0.1%, which corresponds to a 5-meter-diameter asteroid. During a 4-year survey, the Pan-STARRS prototype will have a 20% probability of detecting an impacting 1-meter-diameter asteroid.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

Detecting Earth-Impacting Asteroids with the Pan-STARRS Prototype Telescope does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with Detecting Earth-Impacting Asteroids with the Pan-STARRS Prototype Telescope, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Detecting Earth-Impacting Asteroids with the Pan-STARRS Prototype Telescope will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1439367