Digitizing and Automating Near-Earth Object discovery: a brief history

One of the major transformations in American science over the past fifty years has been the introduction and proliferation of digital imaging and digital image processing. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mariner Mars 1964 sent the first close up images of Mars back to Earth digitally, although the imager itself was a vidicon tube and not a solid-state device. JPL then developed solid-state digital imagers for the Wide-Field and Planetary Camera aboard the Hubble Space Telescope and for the Galileo mission to Jupiter in the 1970s, and in parallel developed processing techniques to enhance images and to extract information from them. Spares from these efforts served as the basis for the first digital camera at the Mt Palomar Observatory, and later JPL astronomer Eleanor Helin built her Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program around spare CCDs. NEAT and another ground-based asteroid hunting program, SpaceWatch, exploited the opportunities available from digital imaging and image processing to begin automating near-Earth object discovery, a task that was once slow and labor intensive.

The levels of automation achieved via digitization of the astronomical data pipeline enabled meeting a policy goal established by the U.S. Congress in 1995 to identify 90% of the 1 km or larger diameter near-Earth asteroids at very low cost. This paper will review the history of digital imaging at JPL and then expand its frame to trace other efforts to incorporate digital imaging technologies into NEO observing programs.