Autonomous on-board Near Earth Object detection

Abstract

Most large asteroid population discovery has been accomplished to date by Earth-based telescopes. It is speculated that most of the smaller Near Earth Objects (NEOs) that are less than 100 meters in diameter, whose impact can create substantial city-size damage, have not yet been discovered. Many asteroids cannot be detected with an Earth-based telescope given their size and/or their location with respect to the Sun. We are investigating the feasibility of deploying asteroid detection algorithms on-board a spacecraft, thereby minimizing the expense and need to downlink large collection of images. Having autonomous on-board image analysis algorithms enables the deployment of a spacecraft at approximately 0.7 AU heliocentric or Earth-Sun L1/L2 halo orbits, removing some of the challenges associated with detecting asteroids with Earth-based telescopes. We describe an image analysis algorithmic pipeline developed and targeted for on-board asteroid detection and show that its performance is consistent with deployment on flight-qualified hardware.