Duration: 36 months
Tracking Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) is crucial for assessing potential Earth impact risks and developing effective mitigation strategies. Current surveys achieve an estimated detection completeness of approximately 88% to 91% for NEAs with diameters around 1 km. However, this rate decreases significantly to about 30% for smaller NEAs >100 m in diameter. Furthermore several objects like 1979 XB, a ~500 m in diameter NEA with a non-zero impact probability, despite discovered, have not been followed-up since discovery, in 1979.
This project aims at investigating natural and artificial factors contributing to gaps in NEA's discovery and follow-up detection, including intrinsic dynamical or observational limitations.
This will be tackled through the objectives:
1. Identify families of undiscovered NEAs by comparing the known NEA population with model-based estimates, and analyse their orbital properties to understand the reasons for their missed detection. This will also provide insights into potential indirect biases within current NEA models.
2. Analyse systematic misclassifications of NEA tracklets by currently available NEA-Classification codes (e.g., Digest2). This analysis will aim to identify potential improvements to these classification methods that could enhance re-detection rates.
3. Develop tool for targeted recovery search of lost NEAs, possibly already in risk list (e.g. 1979 XB), allowing for searches in the observations archives, or for planning recovery search campaigns. The identification of such detections could lead to refined orbital parameters and more accurate impact probability estimates.
By investigating the causes of NEAs detection gaps, this research seeks to enhance awareness regarding the limitations of current observational capabilities and strategies, and to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the NEA population, thereby mitigating the risk posed by potentially hazardous asteroids (PHA) that currently remain undetected.
