A new approach to asteroid classification with application to the NEO Surveyor mission

NEO Surveyor is a NASA-led space telescope mission scheduled for launch in September 2027. Its primary objective is to discover the majority of potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), objects large enough to cause significant damage in the event of an Earth impact. The Minor Planet Center (MPC), is working in close collaboration with the NEO Surveyor team to evaluate the mission’s expected success rate in discovering new PHAs. 

The MPC has been developing robust algorithms capable of both linking and fitting orbits from NEO Surveyor’s simulated observations. Fitting orbits to NEO Surveyor observations is particularly challenging due to the short observational arcs of many objects, combined with the significant uncertainty in the measurements driven primarily by the larger PSFs due to the infrared wavelengths the mission will be observing at. 

The MPC is developing novel, fitting-independent classification techniques that are able to derive dynamical characteristics of the objects directly from short-arc detections. These preliminary characterizations will then guide and constrain the subsequent orbit-fitting algorithms. 

We present the results of end-to-end tests conducted with the NEO Surveyor Team, from simulated observations through tracklet linking and orbit fitting. We describe novel, limited-data classification methods that extract orbital information from very short arcs, and demonstrate how incorporating these preliminary characterizations improves the accuracy and convergence of our orbit-fitting pipeline 

These results could establish a framework for processing observations from future short‐arc missions, such as ESA’s NEOMIR, by applying our new approach to asteroid classification to the discovery and characterization of NEAs.