NEOWISE OBSERVATIONS OF NEAR-EARTH OBJECTS: PRELIMINARY RESULTS

By A. Mainzer, T. Grav, J. Bauer, J. Masiero, Robert S. McMillan, R. Cutri, R. Walker, E. L. Wright, Peter Eisenhardt, D. Tholen and 27 more. 2011

313 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With the NEOWISE portion of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) project, we have carried out a highly uniform survey of the near-Earth object (NEO) population at thermal infrared wavelengths ranging from 3 to 22 μm, allowing us to refine estimates of their numbers, sizes, and albedos. The NEOWISE survey detected NEOs the same way whether they were previously known or not, subject to the availability of ground-based follow-up observations, resulting in the discovery of more than 130 new NEOs. The survey's uniform sensitivity, observing cadence, and image quality have permitted extrapolation of the 428 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) detected by NEOWISE during the fully cryogenic portion of the WISE mission to the larger population. We find that there are 981 ± 19 NEAs larger than 1 km and 20,500 ± 3000 NEAs larger than 100 m. We show that the Spaceguard goal of detecting 90% of all 1 km NEAs has been met, and that the cumulative size distribution is best represented by a broken power law with a slope of 1.32 ± 0.14 below 1.5 km. This power-law slope produces ∼13, 200 ± 1900 NEAs with D > 140 m. Although previous studies predict another break in the cumulative size distribution below D ∼ 50–100 m, resulting in an increase in the number of NEOs in this size range and smaller, we did not detect enough objects to comment on this increase. The overall number for the NEA population between 100 and 1000 m is lower than previous estimates. The numbers of near-Earth comets and potentially hazardous NEOs will be the subject of future work.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b1a8115349e78ef715309765062c43c0305f807

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Citations in the corpus

BANYAN. VII. A NEW POPULATION OF YOUNG SUBSTELLAR CANDIDATE MEMBERS OF NEARBY MOVING GROUPS FROM THE BASS SURVEY (2015, methodology): “The AllWISE survey is based on a combination of the cryogenic phase of the Wide-Field Survey Explorer mission (WISE; Wright et al. 2010) and the Near-Earth Object WISE (NEOWISE; Mainzer et al. 2011) post-cryogenic phase.”
Absolute magnitudes of asteroids and a revision of asteroid albedo estimates from WISE thermal observations (2012, unknown): “The reason for this modiﬁcation of the Harris&Harris method is that most of the H values tabulated in Masiero et al. (2011) and Mainzer et al. (2011b) are ‘‘starting values’’ in their calculations and not their ﬁnal solution values of H , which in some cases came from band 1 or 2 ﬂux measurements…”
INITIAL PERFORMANCE OF THE NEOWISE REACTIVATION MISSION (2014, unknown): “If high-quality photometry at multiple infrared wavelengths centered near the peak of an asteroid’s thermal emission (typically ∼10 µm for ∼300 K NEOs) is available that adequately samples its rotational phase, effective spherical diameter can be determined to within ±10% (Mainzer et al. 2011c,d).”
Asteroid family ages (2015, methodology): “The common geometric albedo is the average value of the known WISE albedos (Wright et al., 2010; Mainzer et al., 2011) for the asteroids in the family.”