Ronak Shah, (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Deborah F. Woods, (MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Walter Faccenda, (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Julie Johnson, (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Richard Lambour, (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Eric C. Pearce, (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), J. Scott Stuart, (MIT Lincoln Laboratory)
Keywords: Asteroid, Near-Earth asteroid, identification and tracking, Space Surveillance Telescope, SST, wide field-of-view , space situational awareness
Abstract:
The Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) is a 3.5 m wide field-of-view system developed for DARPA by MIT Lincoln Laboratory to advance the nations capabilities in space situational awareness. In addition to the national interest in identifying and cataloging man-made space objects, there is a growing concern for near-Earth asteroid identification and tracking. MIT is developing a program to detect near-Earth asteroids, as an extension of the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey, to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, and to extend the catalog of known asteroids to smaller sizes (< 140 m). MIT believes SSTs capability to detect asteroids on size scales as small as 5-10 m is well suited to provide NASA with a sample of small asteroids of interest for its proposed mission to send astronauts to near-Earth asteroids as a stepping-stone to further manned exploration of the Solar System. The Keck Institute for Space Studies (Brophy et al. 2012), studied the feasibility of asteroid capture into lunar orbit as a destination for additional investigation. A major requirement of such an effort is the development of a sample of suitable asteroids, a job that SST is uniquely able to achieve by means of its capacity for search rate and sensitivity. The SST also brings the capability of high speed photometry at rates of 100 Hz to 1 kHz; we present initial observations of asteroids using the photometers. Date of Conference: September 10-13, 2013
Track: Featured