Modeling of the Expected Performance for the German AsteroidFinder Mission

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) has selected the ASTEROIDFINDER (AF) experiment to be flown as the first of a new series of national compact satellite missions. The main goal of the mission is to search for Inner Earth Objects (IEOs) from a low earth orbit, using a 30cm class wide-field telescope and an array of CCDs. The mission, which is currently in its Phase A and whose launch is envisaged for 2012, shall scan the region of sky at small solar elongations for a minimum lifetime of one year. This study reports the results of the modeling of the performance of the AF survey, under varying observing conditions and strategies. The basis for the simulations is a population of some 56000 orbital elements of synthetic NEAs, kindly provided by A. Morbidelli. This distribution contains 1190 orbital elements for IEOs down to an absolute magnitude H=23.0. In addition, we also used the orbital elements of the currently known NEA population, taken from the database of the Minor Planet Center.