Assessing the Vera Rubin Observatory's Ability to Discover Asteroid Impactors Before They Collide with Earth

Abstract

Asteroid impactors larger than ~10 m, from Chelyabinsk-scale airburst and Tunguska-scale events to >300 m continental threats, remain the dominant planetary-defense risk. While the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) will transform Solar System science, its observing cadence and survey design were not specifically optimized to discover imminent impactors. To assess its performance, we introduce a new method for efficiently generating synthetic impactor populations by minimally perturbing sampled NEOMOD3 orbits and evaluate their discovery efficiency with the Sorcha survey simulator. Our simulations show that LSST discovers 79.7% of large impactors (>140 m), decreasing to 50.3% for upper mid-sized (50-140 m), 26.8% for lower mid-sized (20 - 50 m), and 10.5% for small objects (10-20 m). Warning times of the discovered impactors show a similar size dependence: small objects are typically discovered only weeks before impact (median:12.4 days), lower mid-sized within a month (median: 21.5 days), and upper mid-sized objects on timescales of a few months (median: 106.2 days). 39.0% of large impactors are discovered more than a year before impact, lacking long-lead warning despite their brightness. A loss-mode analysis reveals the underlying cause that small impactors are limited mainly by photometric sensitivity, whereas mid-sized and large objects are missed primarily due to cadence and linking constraints from LSST and its Solar System Processing (SSP) Pipelines. These results show that LSST excels at discovering faint, small impactors, but cannot by itself guarantee long-lead warning across the hazardous size spectrum. Coordinated multi-survey strategies will therefore be essential in the LSST era to achieve robust planetary-defense capability, and we study a complementary high-cadence, shallow-depth example with the Argus Array.