Asteroid Impact Hazard Warning from the Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission

Abstract

NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission, scheduled for launch in 2027 September, is designed to detect and characterize at least two-thirds of the potentially hazardous asteroids with diameters larger than 140 m in a nominal 5 yr mission. We describe a model to estimate the survey performance using a faster approach than the time domain survey simulator described in Mainzer et al. (2023). This model is applied to explain how the completeness for 5 and 10 yr surveys varies with orbit type and asteroid size and to identify orbits with notably high or low likelihoods of detection. Size alone is an incomplete proxy for impact hazard, so for each asteroid orbit, we also calculate the associated hazard based on the impact velocity and the relative likelihood of impact. We then estimate how effective the mission will be at anticipating impacts as a function of impact energy, finding that a 5 yr mission will identify 87% of potential impacts larger than 100 Mt (Torino-9, “Regional Devastation”). For a 10 yr mission, this increases to 94%. We also show how the distribution of warning time varies with impact energy.

Keywords

• Near-Earth objects
• Asteroids
• Surveys
• Sky surveys
• Infrared astronomy