Predictions of Imminent Earth Impactors Discovered by LSST

Abstract Imminent impactors are natural bodies discovered in space before impacting the Earth. They provide a rare opportunity to characterize individual near-Earth objects (NEOs) in great detail as asteroids in space, meteors in Earth’s atmosphere, and meteorites on the ground. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) is expected to transform our understanding of the NEO population. In this work, we evaluate LSST’s expected discovery performance for imminent impactors using 343 meter-size objects previously recorded in NASA’s CNEOS database as fireballs impacting Earth’s atmosphere. We simulate pre-impact observations of these CNEOS impactors with the Sorcha survey simulator under LSST’s default three-night discovery strategy and a one-night strategy for fast-moving objects that relies on matching aligned streaks in two exposures on the same night. We estimate that LSST will discover ∼1–2 meter-size and larger imminent impactors per year, representing ∼4% of all Earth impactors ≳1 m in diameter and almost doubling the current discovery rate of imminent impactors. The median time of discovery and median time of first observation for impactors discovered in our simulations are ∼1.57 and ∼3.06 days before impact, respectively. The spatial distribution of the 11 previously discovered imminent impactors is biased toward the Northern Hemisphere, where the observatories that discovered them are located. We find a similar trend toward Southern Hemisphere impacts in our simulated LSST detections of the CNEOS impactors, suggesting Rubin will provide a powerful counterpart to existing asteroid surveys primarily located in the Northern Hemisphere.