Alternative names | LINEAR |
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Coordinates | 33°49′05″N 106°39′33″W / 33.8181°N 106.6592°W |
Observatory code | 704 |
Website | www |
LINEAR NEAT Spacewatch LONEOS | CSS Pan-STARRS NEOWISE All others |
The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project is a collaboration of the United States Air Force, NASA, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory for the systematic detection and tracking of near-Earth objects. LINEAR was responsible for the majority of asteroid discoveries from 1998 until it was overtaken by the Catalina Sky Survey in 2005.[1] As of 15 September 2011[ref], LINEAR had detected 231,082 new small Solar System bodies, of which at least 2,423 were near-Earth asteroids and 279 were comets.[2] The instruments used by the LINEAR program are located at Lincoln Laboratory's Experimental Test Site (ETS) on the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) near Socorro, New Mexico.