Anyone know why NEAT has fallen off so badly in detection? I thought the addition of the Oschin scope was supposed to really ramp up their program and for a while it looked like it did when they briefly approached LINEAR in discovery rate in the second half of '02, but they've gone rapidly downhill since then. The discovery stats at JPL's NEO site show a steady drop in LINEAR's discovery rate for large NEO's as one would expect as we approach completion (currently estimated at about 75% for > 1 km) but NEAT has fallen off more and isn't even keeping up with small object detections. It's barely keeping up with the LONEOS program which uses a smaller scope.

The positive surprise is the Catalina sky survey which has zoomed into second placed and even surpassed LINEAR for large NEOs. I know they upgraded their system and added a Southern scope, but I don't recall predictions of such a huge improvement. Given Catalina's huge improvement its hard to understand NEAT's decline. Are they getting less time? Have they fallen behind in technology (software or CCDs) as the others have upgraded?

The guys at LONEOS seem to being a great job with a small scope (.6m) as is Catalina. I can't wait to see what the LONEOS folks accomplish with This. I assume it will be the same folks since it's the same observatory.

Regards,
Mark