A study found that ground-based (LSST) and space-based (NEOCam) telescopes would complement one another in the search for potentially hazardous asteroids. Without them, NASA will still miss about 50 percent of threats by 2030. (credit: Astronomical Journal)
A decade ago, in a strikingly forward-thinking move, the US Congress passed a law requiring NASA to identify 90 percent of asteroids that were 140 meters across or larger and could potentially threaten Earth. Congress gave NASA a deadline of 2020 to meet that goal, but the agency will fall far short of that target. The agency has a valid excuse: it never received funding to meet this goal.
Now, however, there is some hope for finding killer asteroids. The National Science Foundation has backed the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Chile, and NASA is considering funding NEOCam, a space-based infrared telescope that would specialize in identifying potentially hazardous asteroids. But scientists weren't quite sure how these two instruments would fare in a concerted hunt for large asteroids.
A new pre-print on arXiv offers some clarity, and the answer appears to be that the ground-based and space-based approaches will complement one another nicely. According to a new simulation of near-Earth threats and the capabilities of these two instruments, neither the ground-based telescope nor NEOCam would come close to finding all of the potential hazards on their own. However, when combined, they were projected to find a little more than 90 percent of the threats.
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