Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research

Number of NEOs detected by various projects

LINEAR       NEAT       Spacewatch       LONEOS

Catalina Sky Survey       Pan-STARRS       NEOWISE       other

The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project is a collaboration of the United States Air Force, NASA, and the MIT's Lincoln Laboratory for the systematic detection and tracking of near-Earth objects. LINEAR was responsible for the majority of asteroid discoveries from 1998 until it was overtaken by the Catalina Sky Survey in 2005. As of 15 September 2011, LINEAR had detected 231,082 new small Solar System bodies, of which at least 2,423 were near-Earth asteroids and 279 were comets. The instruments used by the LINEAR program are located at the Lincoln Laboratory's site on the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) near Socorro, New Mexico.

History

In the late 1970s, a prototype called the Lincoln Laboratory Experimental Test System (ETS) (MPC code 704) was built at WSMR. The project used low-light video cameras. In 1994 a new proposal was made for automated detection of asteroids, this time using newer digital detector technology. The LINEAR project began operating a near-Earth object (NEO) discovery facility in 1996 using a 1.0 m (39 in) aperture telescope designed for the Air Force Space Command's Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS). The wide-field Air Force telescopes were designed for optical observation of Earth-orbiting spacecraft. Initial field tests used a 1024 × 1024 pixel charge-coupled device (CCD) detector. While this CCD detector filled only about one fifth of the telescope's field of view, four near-earth objects were discovered. A 1960 × 2560 pixel CCD which covered the telescope's two-square degree field of view was then installed, and both detectors were used in later tests.

The first LINEAR telescope became fully operational in March 1998. Beginning in October 1999, a second 1.0 m telescope was added to the search effort. In 2002, a 0.5 m (20 in) telescope equipped with the original CCD was brought on-line to provide follow-up observations for the discoveries made by the two search telescopes. This allowed about 20% more of the sky to be searched each night. Data recorded by the telescopes is sent to a Lincoln Laboratory facility at Hanscom Air Force Base in Lexington, Massachusetts for processing. Detections are then forwarded to the Minor Planet Center.

Discoveries

In addition to discovering hundreds of thousands of asteroids, LINEAR is also credited with the discovery, or co-discovery, or rediscovery of several periodic comets, including 11P/Tempel–Swift–LINEAR, 158P/Kowal-LINEAR, 160P/LINEAR (LINEAR 43), 165P/LINEAR (LINEAR 10), and 176P/LINEAR (LINEAR 52, 118401 LINEAR: one of only five objects classified both as comets and asteroids). Other objects discovered include (137108) 1999 AN10, (179806) 2002 TD66, and 2004 FH.

See also

• EURONEAR
• List of comets discovered by the LINEAR project
• Minor Planet Center
• Planetary Data System

External links

• Official website
• NEO discovery statistics from JPL. Shows the number of asteroids of various types (potentially hazardous, size >1 km, etc.) that different programs have discovered, by year.
• Sky Database for Objects in Time-Domain provides corrected LINEAR data.