Evaluation of AN NEO Close Approach Frequency Index for Public/media Release Purposes
Abstract
In present times, and on many occasions, the near-Earth object (NEO) community has seen how news about asteroid close approaches to Earth have broken out in the media without a clear criterion determining why those close approaches merited news coverage while others did not. Actually, the originator of such news quickly dims as the news expand through the different media, thus not allowing to properly track the reasons for its outbreak.
ESA's NEO Coordination Centre (NEOCC) provides a list of asteroid recent past close approaches and near future close approaches in its web portal. The Minor Planet Centre (MPC) also provides a list of historical close approaches. Both references are good sources of information for experts, media and general public to evaluate the asteroid close approaches with Earth. In this work we present the results of a study to derive a concise, yet accurate, evaluation of the frequency of a close approach such that a related "relevance index" can be computed and released to the public. With that index, the press and other media agents and the public will have a rank to evaluate the importance of each close approach case. This criterion could also be used as an indicator for journalists on when it is worth asking for more information to the NEO expert community. The release to the public will be performed through the close approaches list provided in NEOCC's technical web portal. The derivation of the index has been based on the current NEA population models, and the average NEA impact frequency with Earth. It takes the object's absolute magnitude and the close approach distance and velocity into account. The resulting index foresees five types of events: very rare (once every 100 years or less frequent), rare (between 10 years and 100 years), infrequent (between 1 year and 10 years), frequent (between 1 month and 1 year) and very frequent (more than once per month).- Publication:
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7th IAA Planetary Defense Conference
- Pub Date:
- April 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021plde.confE..86C
- Keywords:
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- NEA close approaches;
- NEA population;
- NEA communications