Abstract
This chapter deals with individual assets involved in discovery of NEOs. Past, current and future surveys are described, with their diverse technical architectures and objectives. In addition to the ground-based telescopes that deliver the most discoveries, past, current and future space-based missions are presented. Current limits for discovery are defined by the aperture size of the telescope and the observing geometry and viewing angle of a telescope, with the Earth representing an obstruction that avoids looking closer to the Sun. The smallest NEOs are still discovered only incidentally; ground-based telescopes cannot reach asteroids with orbits mostly inside the Earth’s orbit. Long periodic comets remain a low-level threat. Discovery and follow-up have migrated from manual efforts and individual observers toward an automated regime and large dedicated discovery surveys, supported by software development and automated processing of large data.
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Online Resources
Catalina Sky Survey: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/css/
LONEOS: http://asteroid.lowell.edu/asteroid/loneos/loneos.html
LSST: https://www.lsst.org/
NEOCAM: http://neocam.ipac.caltech.edu/
NEOWISE: http://neowise.ipac.caltech.edu/
Pan-STARRS: http://pswww.ifa.hawaii.edu/pswww/
SENTINEL: https://b612foundation.org/sentinel/
Space Telescope Science Institute: https://panstarrs.stsci.edu/
Spacewatch: http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/
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Vereš, P. (2019). Technical Architecture to Deepen Our Solar System Awareness. In: Schmidt, N. (eds) Planetary Defense. Space and Society. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01000-3_5
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