Predictions of Imminent Earth Impactors Discovered by LSST
Ian Chow, Mario Juri\'c, R. Lynne Jones, Kathleen Kiker, Joachim Moeyens, Peter G. Brown, Aren N. Heinze, and Jacob A. Kurlander

TL;DR
This study evaluates LSST's capability to detect imminent Earth impactors, predicting it will discover 1-2 meter-sized objects annually, significantly increasing current detection rates and providing early warnings for potential impacts.
Contribution
The paper simulates LSST's performance in discovering imminent impactors, highlighting its potential to nearly double current detection rates and improve global impact monitoring.
Findings
LSST will discover approximately 1-2 meter-size impactors per year.
Discovered impactors are typically identified about 1.57 days before impact.
LSST's detections will complement existing surveys, especially in the Southern Hemisphere.
Abstract
Imminent impactors are natural bodies discovered in space before impacting the Earth. They provide a rare opportunity to characterize individual near-Earth objects (NEOs) in great detail as asteroids in space, meteors in Earth's atmosphere and meteorites on the ground. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is expected to transform our understanding of the NEO population. In this work, we evaluate LSST's expected discovery performance for imminent impactors using meter-size objects previously recorded in NASA's CNEOS database as fireballs impacting Earth's atmosphere. We simulate pre-impact observations of these CNEOS impactors with the Sorcha survey simulator under LSST's default three-night discovery strategy and a one-night strategy for fast-moving objects that relies on matching aligned streaks in two exposures on the same night. We…
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