Search Capability for Near-Earth Objects with the Wide Field Survey Telescope

Abstract Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST), with a powerful sky survey capability in the northern hemisphere, will play an important role in asteroid searching and monitoring. However, WFST is not a telescope dedicated to near-Earth asteroids (NEOs) searching. In order to improve the efficiency of finding NEOs on the premise of meeting the needs of other scientific research, we ran mock observations for WFST to study its search capability for NEOs. The NEO population model, the WFST detection model and site conditions are taken into account in our simulations. Based on the original scheduling scheme, we present two new schemes. Compared to the original scheme, the optimized scheme can improve the search capability of known and unknown NEOs by 100% and 50%. We also emphasized the importance of trailing loss and proposed an improved effective field of view model. In addition, it is predicted that adopting the clear-day ratio of 0.7 and the optimized scheme, during one year of regular survey, for NEOs with absolute magnitude from 17 to 25, WFST can provide tracklets for about 1800 NEOs if their orbits are known, and in the case of blind search, more than 600 NEOs can be found by WFST. The new schemes provide valuable reference and suggestions for the WFST’s regular survey strategy.