DECam, NEOs, LSST: Lessons (to be) learned David E. Trilling 2012 LSST AHM That’s a lot of acronyms

What is an NEO?

NEO = Near Earth Object

Why do we care about NEOs? Nearest neighbors to the Earth Flow of material from elsewhere in the Solar System – a cosmochemical probe Sometimes they hit the Earth! Congressional mandate to characterize impact risk from objects >140 meters

DECam + NEOs DECam: The Dark Energy Camera on the NOAO Blanco 4-meter telescope Field of view: 3 square degrees Primarily used for Dark Energy Survey, but community time available as well We (PI: Lori Allen) nominally will have some SV time as well as some regular (shared-risk) time later this fall NASA funding

DECam + NEOs: Etendue! SS (0.5 m) (4 m)

Survey strategy The vast majority of our detected objects will be too faint for NEO-oriented telescopes in the South (aperture limited) We will do self-recovery Interleave “new” and “repeat” nights So many NEOs per pointing that we can just revisit the same pointings for recovery Important: NOT targeted follow-up. Just re- scan

Survey strategy 1,3,52,4,61,3,52,4,6 NEO motion

Survey issues Data volume (1 GB each) and data transfer We will use ~1 minute images Image pre-processing (How? What?) Moving object identification (MOPS) Rapid turn-around – do we need this? Why? No one else can recover these objects.

Sound familiar? Etendue: Bigger than everyone else (in the South) Follow-up: No one else can do it Data volume and data transfer: Big Image pre-processing: How? Rapid turnaround: How fast do we really need?

Sound familiar? Etendue: Bigger than everyone else (in the South) Follow-up: No one else can do it Data volume and data transfer: Big Image pre-processing: How? Rapid turnaround: How fast do we really need? LSST

Lessons (to be) learned Survey strategy – Self-followup Data processing and data volume – Data to Tucson, pre-processing – MOPS elsewhere Rapid follow-up – No

Lessons (to be) learned Survey strategy – Self-followup Data processing and data volume – Data to Tucson, pre-processing – MOPS elsewhere Rapid follow-up – No But in six months’ time this might be a very different talk!