Other Asteroid Surveys

The very real danger of asteroid and comet impacts has inspired many excellent projects which have and continue to help reduce the risk of an unexpected encounter with Earth. ATLAS distinguishes itself from other surveys because it is specifically designed to survey the entire visible sky twice every night.

NASA maintains a page with links to many programs relating to asteroid and comet impact hazard. Some of the more active ones are listed below:

Armagh Observatory

The University of Armagh has an active interest in meteoroids and asteroids with lots of striking videos created by Scott Manley illustrating things like the discovery of asteroids and a realistic animation of what an asteroid impact would look like.

CSS

The Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) utilizes three refurbished telescopes all using identical CCD detectors. The three telescopes are located at Steward Observatory (0.7 meter),  Siding Spring (0.5 meter), and Mt. Lemmon (1.5 meter). It is currently the most productive NEO survey program.

JPL

The Near Earth Object Program at JPL is a NASA-sponsored effort to detect, track and characterize potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that could approach the Earth. The webpage contains a lot of general information as well as tools to calculate orbits etc. A great resource.

JSGA

The Japanese Spaceguard Association (JSGA) uses a 0.5-meter telescope to discover NEOs and has been in operation since 2000. They plan to use a 1-meter telescope in the future.

LINEAR

The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) uses a one-meter aperture GEODSS telescope to discover NEOs. They observe each patch of sky 5 times in one night with most of the efforts going into searching along the ecliptic plane where most NEOs would be expected.

LONEOS

The Lowell Observatory Near-Earth Object Search (LONEOS) utilized a 0.6-meter Schmidt telescope in Flagstaff, Arizona. It operated for about 10 years (1996-2007).

MPC

The Minor Planet Center (MPC) is responsible for the designation of minor bodies in the solar system, as well as the collection, computation, verification and dissemination of astrometric observations and orbits for minor planets and comets.

NEAT

The Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) survey operated for 10 years, using a 1.2-meter aperture AMOS telescope to discover NEOs. They had two autonomous observatories, one at the Maui Space Surveillance Site and the other at Palomar Observatory.

NEODyS

The Near Earth Objects Dynamic Site (NEODyS) at the University of Pisa, Italy, provides dynamically generated home pages for all Near Earth Objects (NEO). Information is updated daily.

NEOWISE

One objective of the space-based Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) was to search for NEOs. WISE used a 0.4m telescope, and observed the entire sky 1.5 times during its 9 month lifetime.

Pan-STARRS

The Pan-STARRS1 science mission is in full operation mode and is one of the top 3 NEO discovery sites.

Spacewatch

The primary goal of Spacewatch is to explore the various populations of small objects in the solar system and study the statistics of asteroids and comets in order to investigate the dynamical evolution of the solar system.

Sentinel

An ambitious project by the B612 foundation to place a privately-funded spacecraft in a Venus-like orbit to look for dangerous Near Earth Objects.

Other programs on the horizon include: