Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking
| Abbreviation | NEAT |
|---|---|
| Predecessor | Palomar Planet-Crossing Asteroid Survey |
| Successor | Near Earth Object Program |
| Formation | December 1995 |
| Founded at | Haleakalā Observatory, Maui, Hawaii |
| Extinction | April 2007 |
| Type | Space observation program |
| Legal status | Disbanded |
| Purpose | To search for and map out near-earth asteroids |
|
Principal Investigator
|
Raymond Bambery |
|
Co-Investigator and Project Manager
|
Steven H. Pravdo |
|
Co-Investigators
|
David L. Rabinowitz, Ken Lawrence and Michael Hicks |
|
Main organ
|
National Aeronautics and Space Administration |
|
Parent organization
|
Jet Propulsion Laboratory |
| Website | neat |
Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) was a program run by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, surveying the sky for near-Earth objects. NEAT was conducted from December 1995 until April 2007, at GEODSS on Hawaii (Haleakala-NEAT; 566), as well as at Palomar Observatory in California (Palomar-NEAT; 644). With the discovery of more than 40 thousand minor planets, NEAT has been one of the most successful programs in this field, comparable to the Catalina Sky Survey, LONEOS and Mount Lemmon Survey.
NEAT was the successor of the Palomar Planet-Crossing Asteroid Survey (PCAS).
The original principal investigator was Eleanor F. Helin, with co-investigators Steven H. Pravdo and David L. Rabinowitz.
NEAT has a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Air Force to use a GEODSS telescope located on Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii. GEODSS stands for Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance and these wide field Air Force telescopes were designed to optically observe Earth orbital spacecraft. The NEAT team designed a CCD camera and computer system for the GEODSS telescope. The CCD camera format is 4096 × 4096 pixels and the field of view is 1.2° × 1.6°.
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