This ninth cycle of the NEOSSat Science Guest Observation Program is open for applications through March 31, 2025.
According to the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) the NEOSSat space telescope was the first telescope dedicated to detecting and tracking asteroids, comets, satellites and space debris when it was launched February 25, 2013.
The CSA states that the “NEOSSat orbits in a sun-synchronous orbit at 785 km altitude over the terminator of the Earth with a 100 min period (15 orbits per day). The space telescope “NEOSSat “has a single visible-band instrument, a 15-cm telescope with two 1024 × 1024 frame-transfer CCD detectors (Figure 2) and no filters. One CCD is dedicated for fine guidance (star tracking), while the other imager is used for the science.”
For the ninth cycle the CSA provided the following overview:
“The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) solicits proposals for the acquisition and analysis of new scientific data from the NEOSSat (Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite) space telescope. Unaffected by day/night and weather conditions, NEOSSat can perform space-based imaging including conducting photometric studies with precision sufficient to perform asteroseismology studies and other variability analyses of stars and exoplanet systems. NEOSSat has already demonstrated imaging and photometry of certain exoplanet transits (see example in Appendix A1). NEOSSat is well-suited for the study of near-Earth asteroids or comets as it provides near-Sun observing capabilities and can provide direct parallax measurements of nearby objects due to its orbit around Earth. This is demonstrated in examples shown in Appendix A2, and Ref 4.c. Astrometric observations have been submitted to the Minor Planet Center, under NEOSSat’s observatory code C53.”
“The intent of this AO is to offer observation time on NEOSSat to the scientific community on a competitive basis. CSA is not planning to issue grants as part of this announcement of opportunity (AO). Successful applicants will retrieve requested data on the CSA open data portal or from the CADC. There will be no proprietary period applied to the acquired datasets. (Note that all data from previous cycles are available on CADC and CSA Open Data portal.)”
The ninth cycle of the NEOSSat Science Guest Observation program runs from May 1, 2025 to October 31, 2025.
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