The NEO follow-up community is large and diverse: participants range from full-time funded NEO programs operating multiple telescopes, to occasional users of shared-use telescopes, to unfunded but highly capable small-aperture stations. NEOfixer is designed to serve the community’s full range of capabilities, and also to work with varying levels of interaction from observers. Some follow-up stations may choose to tightly couple their nighttime operations with NEOfixer, others may prefer to build their own target lists, and still others may not interact directly with NEOfixer at all. NEOfixer can benefit, to varying degrees, from all of these types of observers.
- Tight coupling to NEOfixer: Stations following this model will consult NEOfixer for target recommendations, and will promptly communicate targeting intentions and outcomes, probably using the NEOfixer API. This will be done throughout the night in a continuous communication loop. Given NEOfixer’s dynamic scoring, this observer may populate a queue at the start of the night based on NEOfixer’s recommendations, but will update that queue frequently, consulting NEOfixer to see if priorities of upcoming objects have changed, or whether new high-priority objects are available.
- Loose coupling to NEOfixer: Some follow-up stations may be scheduled in batch mode, with limited ability to modify a queue once the observations are scheduled. Other stations may have their own criteria for building a nightly target list, different from NEOfixer’s. Both of these stations can usefully communicate to NEOfixer their targeting intentions, via the website or the API, regardless of whether NEOfixer was consulted in scheduling the objects. This will help NEOfixer adjust object priorities for the rest of the community, potentially helping to avoid duplicate observations.
- No direct interaction with NEOfixer: Some stations may not directly interact with NEOfixer, but when their NEO observations are published by the MPC, NEOfixer will automatically re-calculate the orbit and adjust those objects’ priorities. Low-latency reporting and publication of astrometry will ensure these observations have the greatest impact.
The more follow-up stations that communicate targeting intentions and outcomes to NEOfixer, and that request targets from NEOfixer, the more effectively the community will build and improve the NEO catalog for planetary defense.