Projected Near-Earth Object Discovery Performance of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Understand

This report describes the methodology and results of an assessment study of the performance of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in its planned efforts to detect and catalog near-Earth objects (NEOs).

• The baseline LSST survey approach is designed to make only two visits to a given field in a given night, leading to two possible NEO detections per night.
• These nightly pairs must be linked across nights to derive orbits of moving objects.
• However, the presence of false detections in the data stream leads to the possibility of high rates of false tracklets, and the ensuing risk that the resulting orbit catalog may be contaminated by false orbits.