The orbital distribution of Near-Earth Objects inside Earth's orbit

By S. Greenstreet, H. Ngo, B. Gladman. 2012

139 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Canada’s Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat), set to launch in early 2012, will search for and track Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), tuning its search to best detect objects with a < 1.0 AU. In order to construct an optimal pointing strategy for NEOSSat, we needed more detailed information in the a < 1.0 AU region than the best current model (Bottke, W.F., Morbidelli, A., Jedicke, R., Petit, J.M., Levison, H.F., Michel, P., Metcalfe, T.S. [2002]. Icarus 156, 399–433) provides. We present here the NEOSSat-1.0 NEO orbital distribution model with larger statistics that permit finer resolution and less uncertainty, especially in the a < 1.0 AU region. We find that Amors = 30.1 ± 0.8%, Apollos = 63.3 ± 0.4%, Atens = 5.0 ± 0.3%, Atiras (0.718 < Q < 0.983 AU) = 1.38 ± 0.04%, and Vatiras (0.307 < Q < 0.718 AU) = 0.22 ± 0.03% of the steady-state NEO population. Vatiras are a previously undiscussed NEO population clearly defined in our integrations, whose orbits lie completely interior to that of Venus. Our integrations also uncovered the unexpected production of retrograde orbits from main-belt asteroid sources; this retrograde NEA population makes up ’0.1% of the steady-state NEO population. The relative NEO impact rate onto Mercury, Venus, and Earth, as well as the normalized distribution of impact speeds, was calculated from the NEOSSat-1.0 orbital model under the assumption of a steady-state. The new model predicts a slightly higher Mercury impact flux.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a25c7897a6afb7d0bd4e6b853fe9865b10688149

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Citations in the corpus

Debiased orbit and absolute-magnitude distributions for near-Earth objects (2018, result): “The results are in very good agreement with those reported in Morbidelli et al. (2002) (Table 5) for H < 17.”
Compositional distributions and evolutionary processes for the near-Earth object population: Results from the MIT-Hawaii Near-Earth Object Spectroscopic Survey (MITHNEOS) (2019, methodology): “We also evaluated, but do not use here the source model by Greenstreet et al. (2012) that assigns probabilities to the same sources as the Bottke et al. (2002) model.”