Near-Earth Asteroid impact dates: A Reference Ideal Method (RIM) approach

Abstract

The dynamics of asteroids’ trajectories constitute potential threats to the Earth in the hypothetical case where the orbit of such an object crosses the orbit of the Earth. For this reason, advanced monitoring systems such as NASA JPL Sentry continually scan trajectories of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs), in addition to other celestial bodies. A large amount of data concerning NEAs is provided by such systems, including estimations of the impact probabilities as well as predictions of impact dates. In this paper, we apply a novel methodology to rank the impact dates of NEAs based on the data provided by Sentry. This approach carries out a comparison process via a novel Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method named the Reference Ideal Method (RIM). It takes into account several NEA features, such as distance to the Earth, width, and impact energy, and establishes comparisons with respect to the impact dates of a population of non-small NEAs with those ones from noteworthy objects 410777 (2009 FD), 29075 (1950 DA), and 101955 Bennu (1999 RQ36). The obtained results have been found to be quite consistent, allowing the authors to present this methodology as a novel metric to assess impact dates of hazardous NEAs.