Catching up, soooo many meetings. This spring was the Vera Rubin Observatory Targets of Opportunity Workshop. It had been identified and noted years ago that VRO has a survey cadence, to find interesting targets in the sky, catalog them outright, and catalog any changes- brightening (including bursting), motion, or something we don’t even know about today. However, cataloging them and their changes may reach the point of breaking cadence- interrupting the scheduled survey. It was thus noted that some ToO policy and procedure be in place before the survey begins. Given that no one person, institution, or subdiscipline (galaxies vs. supernovae, for example) controls VRO, it falls upon a committee to define (and thus redefine) the survey op. The VRO ToO Workshop, then, is that committee assembling to do that redefinition (so far…).
The output of that meeting is posted online. For our purposes, asteroid ToOs form one of the main sections:
Rubin_2024_ToO_workshop_final_report.pdf
“Rubin ToO 2024: Envisioning the Vera C. Rubin Observatory LSST Target of Opportunity program” Igor Andreoni, Raffaella Margutti, eds.
Section: “Science Case: Small PHA Potential Impactor” p. 38
NEOs in general are one (but one of several) of the key missions of Vera Rubin. Therefore, interesting NEOs (the ones nearer to Earth, and in turn faster across our sky) merit diversion of VRO from the prescheduled survey.