The Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam) is a proposed space-based infrared telescope designed to survey the Solar System for potentially hazardous asteroids. NEOCam would survey from the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, allowing it to look close to the Sun and see objects inside Earth's orbit. NEOCam would be the successor of the NEOWISE mission; the principal investigator is NEOWISE's principal investigator, Amy Mainzer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Proposals for NEOCam were submitted in 2006, 2010, and 2015 to the NASA Discovery Program. In 2010, NEOCam was selected to receive technology development funding to design and test new detectors optimized for asteroid and comet detection and discovery. On 30 September 2015, the Discovery Program advanced NEOCam along with other four candidate missions for refinement during the next year, with each mission receiving US$3 million for a one-year study. Although it was not successful in the 4 January 2017 selection of the next two Discovery missions, it was given an additional year of funding.
Video Near-Earth Object Camera
Overview
The primary scientific goal of NEOCam is to discover and characterize the orbit of most of the potentially hazardous asteroids larger than 140 metres (460 ft) over the course of its four-year mission. NEOCam's field of view would be large enough to allow the mission to discover tens of thousands of new NEOs with sizes as small as 30 m (98 ft) in diameter. Secondary science goals include detection and characterization of approximately one million asteroids in the asteroid belt and thousands of comets.
In 2016, the NEOCam team proposed to launch in 2021 and find two-thirds of missing objects in the larger-than-140-meters category within four years.
The 2009 Proposals to SBAG for NeoCAM was passively cooled to 30k using the techniques on the Spitzer infrared space telescope, and would focus on two infrared wavelength bands, covering a field of view of 11.56 square degrees. The 2009 proposal would cover 3 - 5 µm and 6 - 10 µm wavelength bands at a resolution of 2048 lines by 2048 lines, which would produce 82 Gbits of data per day. In addition to its studies of asteroids passing nearer to Earth, it was predicted it would discover 1 million main belt asteroids.
Maps Near-Earth Object Camera
Scientific payload
The scientific payload would consist of an infrared telescope and a wide-field camera operating at two thermal infrared wavelengths. The mission would likely use a special mercury-cadmium-telluride detector called HgCdTe Astronomical Wide Area Infrared Imager (HAWAII) in development by Teledyne. This detector has good infrared performance without the use of a cryogenic fluid refrigeration. NEOcam will keep relatively cool by operating at the Sun-Earth L1 point and employing a Sun shield. The prototype sensor was successfully tested in April 2013.
Images
See also
- Discovery Program finalists with this mission
- DAVINCI (spacecraft) (Venus entry probe)
- Lucy (spacecraft) (multi-asteroid flyby)
- Psyche (spacecraft) (asteroid orbiter)
- VERITAS (spacecraft) (Venus orbiter)
- NEOs search projects
- B612 Foundation (Organization that has studied NEOs and tried to develop similar mission)
- Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (Canadian small sat to find NEOs)
- The Spaceguard Foundation (Organization that tries to locate NEOs)
- Whipple, a proposed space telescope in the Discovery program
- Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, a near NEO detection system started by NASA at the end of 2015
- Related topics
- Asteroid impact avoidance
- Chelyabinsk meteor
- Impact event
- Tunguska event
- James Webb Space Telescope (infrared telescope in the 21st century)
References
External links
- NEOCam website by Caltech
Source of article : Wikipedia
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