NEAP

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The Near Earth Asteroid Prospector program, (NEAP) is a commercial space exploration project of the SpaceDev corporation. The goal of the program will be to land on an asteroid. Instrumentation and mission goals include: a multi-band camera for navigation and asteroid imaging, a neutron spectrometer to search for water vapor, and an x-ray proton spectrometer to map the elemental abundance of the surface.

Mission Timeline

• 1999-2000 Launch

IRTF Mission Support

• Thermal / optical imaging to get the size, albedo and rotation of the nucleus which will be required for mission planning for imaging and to get estimates of gravity field.
• Thermal measurements as a function of wavelength to model the thermal inertia and temperature for aid in interpreting hte near IR spectra
• Thermal 10 micron spectra for minerology