Caltech/IPAC Lunch Seminar

The Near-Earth Object Surveyor mission will search for potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) from the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point and carries a driving requirement to achieve at least 66% catalog completeness within five years. In this talk, I will discuss systematic simulations of candidate survey cadences to assess mission robustness and to identify opportunities for optimizing scientific throughput. First, I will show that all tested strategies substantially exceed the primary requirement, demonstrating that mission success stems from core system capabilities rather than precise survey optimization. However, cadence choices create important trade-offs in orbit quality, discovery rates across different size regimes, and data volume for thermal modeling. I will close by discussing broader lessons learned in survey and experiment design in the astronomical sciences.