NASA's Neocam To Watch for Asteroid Strikes

摘要

As NASA looks to step up its detection of potentially dangerous near-Earth objects (NEO), it is working on a dedicated deep-space observatory first proposed more than a dozen years ago. Neocam, a sensor equipped with infrared optics that include a 50-cm (20-in.) aperture and 4-4.5-micron and 6-10-micron wavelength channels, would be launched to the Earth/Sun L1 Lagrange point, a gravitationally stable space coordinate about 1 million mi. from Earth in the direction of the Sun. Once there, Neocam would trail the Earth as it orbits the Sun, with a wide field of view of the Solar System to help identify, track and characterize potential impactors large and small. "From my perspective, there are a couple of critical questions we want [answered] about NEOs: when they might impact on human versus astronomical and geological timescales, and how bad they might be," Amy Mainzer, Neocam's principal investigator, said at the International Academy of Astronautics Planetary Defense Conference meeting at the University of Maryland on April 30. "This breaks down to finding the objects and getting good, reliable orbits for them," she said.