1,- 1Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, United States
- 2DiRAC Institute, University of Washington, Seattle, United States
The impending commencement of operations for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is poised to initiate an order of magnitude increase in discoveries of Solar System Objects (Kurlander et al. 2025). Of particular interest to planetary defense efforts are near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) in the 0.1 to 1 km range. Due to the scale of the data set to be generated by LSST, delivering on these promises requires an efficient, scalable discovery algorithm. NEAs in particular require care, as their detections often occur on a dense background of Main Belt objects.
HelioLinC3D (Eggl et al. 2020, Heinze et al. 2022), based on the HelioLinC algorithm (Holman et al. 2018) offers a new approach to linking asteroid detections. Using full scale datasets of simulated asteroid detections for the first year of LSST (Schwamb et. al.), we investigate the performance of HelioLinC3D for discovering NEAs from datasets containing both Main-Belt asteroids (MBAs) and false positives generated by image noise and differencing artifacts. In addition to the verification and testing of the performance of HelioLinC3D for NEAs, we provide discussion on the tuning and selection of various parameters in the algorithm for efficient identification of NEAs, through analysis of the ground truth provided through the simulated detections.
References:
Eggl, S., Juric, M., Moeyens, J., & Jones, L. (2020), AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts, 52, 211.01.
Heinze, A., Eggl, S., Juric, M., et al. (2022), in AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts, Vol. 54, AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts, 504.04
Holman, M. J., Payne, M. J., Blankley, P., Janssen, R., & Kuindersma, S. (2018), AJ, 156, 135
Kurlander, J., Bernardinelli, P., Schwamb, M., Juric, M., Merritt, S., Murtagh, J., Oldag, D., West, M., Holman, M., Cornwall, S., Fedorets, G., Eggl, S., Kubica, J. "Predictions of the LSST Solar System Yield: Near-Earth Objects, Main Belt Asteroids, Jupiter Trojans, and Trans-Neptunian Objects", Planetary Science Journal, accepted.
Schwamb, M. et al. “Sorcha: A Solar System Survey Simulator for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time”, The Planetary Science Journal (in press)
How to cite: Cornwall, S., Eggl, S., Heinze, A., and Engebreth, B.: Assessment of HelioLinC3D performance for near-Earth Asteroid discovery on LSST predictions, EPSC-DPS Joint Meeting 2025, Helsinki, Finland, 7–12 Sep 2025, EPSC-DPS2025-1056, https://doi.org/10.5194/epsc-dps2025-1056, 2025.
