Докладчик: R. Arentz (Ball Aerospace)

Название доклада: “Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs): Some General Considerations for their Discovery, Tracking and Mitigation”

Краткое содержание доклада:

Motivated by numerous concerns related to Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) impacting the Earth, including most recently the air-burst last February over Chelyabinsk, but also extending back in time to the formation of the planet, the detection and then tracking of NEAs has become an interest to all of the major space-faring agencies such as NASA, ESA, the RSA, and the CSA. But finding NEAs is not an intuitively obvious thing to do for ground-based systems. For example most ground-based approaches chose to increase the size of the NEA detection system’s aperture in order to increase sensitivity: the traditional astronomical solution to everything. But after some modest aperture size is reached(~2 to 3 meters), what matters most are things like all-sky-coverage rates, fields of regard and view, and most importantly– passband. The general problems associated with detecting and tracking moving NEAs are first presented, and then some general considerations are given for solving the NEA detection challenges.

This talk will also present summaries of NEA detections to-date by various ground-based systems, and will also present what is could be accomplished by a space-based infrared observatory operating in deep space to specifically detect and track NEAs, a mission called Sentinel, for which money is presently being raised to fly the Sentinel mission by the B612 Foundation, a private group located in the US. A variant of the Sentinel mission concept has recently been published in Russia by Dr. David Dunham et.al.; and also contained in the Proceedings of the Planetary Defense Conference, Flagstaff, Arizona, April 15-19, 2013. This new variation is called SEntineL1, and would operate at Lagrangian Point 1 and only scan the spatial volume close to the Earth.