The Mission Accessible Near-Earth Objects Survey (MANOS): spectroscopy results

The Mission Accessible Near-Earth Object Survey (MANOS) is an ongoing physical characterization survey to build a large, uniform catalog of physical properties including lightcurves and visible wavelength spectroscopy. We will use this catalog to investigate the global properties of the small NEO population and identify individual objects that can be targets of interest for future exploration. To accomplish our goals, MANOS uses a wide variety of telescopes (1-8m) in both the northern and southern hemispheres. We focus on targets that have been recently discovered and operate on a regular cadence of remote and queue observations to enable rapid characterization of small NEOs. Targets for MANOS are selected based on three criteria: mission accessibility, size, and observability. With our resources, we observe 5-10 newly discovered sub-km NEOs per month. MANOS has been operating for three years and we have observed over 500 near-Earth objects in that time.We will present results from the spectroscopy component of the MANOS program. Visible wavelength spectra are obtained using DeVeny on the Discovery Channel Telescope (DCT), Goodman on the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope, and GMOS on Gemini North and South. Over 300 NEO spectra have been obtained during our program. We will present preliminary results from our spectral sample. We will discuss the compositional diversity of the small NEO population and how the observed NEOs compare to the meteorite population.MANOS is funded by the NASA Near-Earth Object Observations program.