How would LSST Find NEOs?
The LSST system is the only proposed astronomical facility that can detect 140-meter objects in the main asteroid belt in less than a minute. The LSST system will be sited at Cerro Pachon in northern Chile, with the first light scheduled for 2014. In a continuous observing campaign, LSST will cover the entire available sky every three nights, with two observations per night. Over the proposed survey lifetime of 10 years, each sky location would be observed about 1000 times. Two NEO detections in a single night are required to estimate its motion, so that its future, or past, detections can be linked together. This linkage has to be done exceedingly robustly because the near-Earth objects will be outnumbered one to hundred by main-belt asteroids which present no threat to Earth. By reliably linking detections on multiple nights, the NEO’s orbit can be reconstructed and used to compute its impact probability with Earth. The high-fidelity simulations of LSST baseline observing campaign de
