DDddahlen·Jan 29, 2025
I work on the Near Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO Surveyor) writing simulation code which predicts which objects we will see.
This one has drummed up a bit of interest due to its (relatively) high chance of impact. I actually spent quite a bit of time yesterday digging through archive images trying trying to see if it was spotted on some previous times it came by the Earth (no luck unfortunately). Since we saw it so briefly, our knowledge of its orbit is not that great, and running the clock back to 2016 for example ended up with a large chunk of sky where it could have been, and it is quite small. We will almost certainly see it again with NEO Surveyor years before its 2032 close encounter. I have not run a simulation for it, but I would not be surprised if LSST (a large ground telescope survey which is currently coming onli
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ne) to catch it around the same time NEO Surveyor does.
Our knowledge of the diameter of this object is a bit fuzzy, because of surface reflectivity, small shiny things can appear as bright as dark large things. This is one of the motivations of making the NEO Surveyor an IR telescope, since IR we see black body emission off of the objects, which is mostly size dependent, and only weakly albedo dependent.
There is an even tinier chance that if it misses the Earth in 2032, it could hit the moon. I haven't run the numbers precisely for that one, but it impacted a few times in some monte-carlo simulations.
If anyone is interested in orbit dynamics, I have open sourced some of the engine we are using for observation predictions: https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/kete
It is relatively high precision, though JPL Horizons has more accurate gravitational models and is far better suited for impact studies. My code is primarily for predicting when objects will be seen in telescopes.