Small near-Earth asteroids in the Palomar Transient Factory survey: A real-time streak-detection system
Adam Waszczak, Thomas A. Prince, Russ Laher, Frank Masci, Brian Bue,, Umaa Rebbapragada, Tom Barlow, Jason Surace, George Helou, Shrinivas Kulkarni

TL;DR
This paper presents a real-time streak-detection system for small near-Earth asteroids in the Palomar Transient Factory survey, enabling rapid discovery and follow-up of high-velocity, small NEAs that are otherwise difficult to detect.
Contribution
It introduces a machine-learning based pipeline for real-time detection of streaked NEAs in optical survey images, with initial confirmed discoveries and scaling laws for detection capabilities.
Findings
Successfully detected and confirmed 10 small NEAs passing close to Earth.
Developed a machine learning classifier to filter false positives efficiently.
Derived scaling laws for NEA streak detection across different surveys.
Abstract
Near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) in the 1-100 meter size range are estimated to be 1,000 times more numerous than the 15,000 currently-catalogued NEAs, most of which are in the 0.5-10 kilometer size range. Impacts from 10-100 meter size NEAs are not statistically life-threatening but may cause significant regional damage, while 1-10 meter size NEAs with low velocities relative to Earth are compelling targets for space missions. We describe the implementation and initial results of a real-time NEA-discovery system specialized for the detection of small, high angular rate (visually-streaked) NEAs in Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) images. PTF is a 1.2-m aperture, 7.3-deg field-of-view optical survey designed primarily for the discovery of extragalactic transients (e.g., supernovae) in 60-second exposures reaching 20.5 visual magnitude. Our real-time NEA discovery pipeline…
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