DDA 2015 – Increasing Space Situational Awareness for NEOs

This is one of a series of notes taken during the 2015 meeting of the AAS Division on Dynamical Astronomy, 3-7 May, at CalTech. An index to this series (all the papers presented at the meeting) is here.

Daniel J.G.J. Hestroffer (IMCCE/Paris observatory)

Abstract

Over the past years, Europe has strengthened its commitment to foster space situational awareness. Apart from the current efforts in tracking space weather, artificial satellites and space debris, Near Earth Asteroid threat assessment is a key task. NEOshield has been part of this European effort. We will give an overview over national projects and European programs with French participation such as PoDET, ESTERS, FRIPON, NEOShield, Gaia-FUN-SSO and Stardust. Future plans regarding Near Earth Object threat assessment and mitigation are described. The role of the IMCCE in this framework is discussed using the example of the post mitigation impact risk analysis of Gravity Tractor and Kinetic Impactor based asteroid deflection demonstration mission designs.

Notes

  • SSA:
    • debris
      • short-term & long-term stability
      • evolution of debris clouds
    • meteorites
      • fish-eye cameras
      • FRIPON network
      • triangulation, orbit/trajectory reconstruction
      • people don’t look up anymore
    • NEOs
  • NEOs
    • ~1500 detections/yr from various surveys
    • ~12,000 catalogued so far
      • still missing many — very incomplete
    • large NEOs: fairly complete census by now
    • GAIA: much ofunobservability cone overlaps NEO territory
      • ongoing ground-based surveys go fainter anyway
    • Need ~250 day arcs to get CEU $\le 1$ arcsec
    • http://neo.ssa.esa.edu
    • ESA appears to be starting to get serious about detection and mitigation schemes

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