Mission design for NEO detection and impact warning system

Abstract

On February 15th, 2013, a meteor with size of about 20 m in diameter entered the Earth's atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and exploded at an altitude of about 20 km, damaging about 4,500 buildings and injuring about 1,500 residents. This incident widely invoked an interest in hazard mitigation caused by a NEO. Motivated by such interests, this study focuses on a new concept of NEO detection and impact warning system. In this concept, a space telescope is placed at the L1 point of the Sun-Earth system to intensively observe the NEOs in-coming from the noon-side, which ground-based observatories hardly detect because of the sunlight. Throughout some cases of simulations, this paper reveals the distributions of NEO directions at detection, V-infinity vectors at the Earth impact, and the NEO orbit determination precision are evaluated.