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To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2009.05.010 Byline: Peter VereA (a), Robert Jedicke (b), Richard Wainscoat (b), Mikael Granvik (b), Steve Chesley (c), Shinsuke Abe (d), Larry Denneau (b), Tommy Grav (e) Keywords: Asteroids; Near-Earth objects; Meteors; Impact processes Abstract: We have performed a simulation of a next generation sky survey's (Pan-STARRS 1) efficiency for detecting Earth-impacting asteroids. The steady-state sky-plane distribution of the impactors long before impact is concentrated towards small solar elongations (Chesley, S.R., Spahr T.B., 2004. In: Belton, M.J.S., Morgan, T.H., Samarashinha, N.H., Yeomans, D.K. (Eds.), Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 22-37) but we find that there is interesting and potentially exploitable behavior in the sky-plane distribution in the months leading up to impact. The next generation surveys will find most of the dangerous impactors (>140m diameter) during their decade-long survey missions though there is the potential to miss difficult objects with long synodic periods appearing in the direction of the Sun, as well as objects with long orbital periods that spend much of their time far from the Sun and Earth. A space-based platform that can observe close to the Sun may be needed to identify many of the potential impactors that spend much of their time interior to the Earth's orbit. The next generation surveys have a good chance of imaging a bolide like 2008 TC.sub.3 before it enters the atmosphere but the difficulty will lie in obtaining enough images in advance of impact to allow an accurate pre-impact orbit to be computed. Author Affiliation: (a) Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Informatics, Comenius University, Mlynska Dolina, 842 48 Bratislava, Slovakia (b) University of Hawai'i, Institute for Astronomy, 2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822-1897, USA (c) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA (d) Institute of Astronomy, National Central University, No. 300, Jhongda Rd, Jhongli City, Taoyuan County 320, Taiwan (e) Department of Physics and Astronomy, Bloomberg 243, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218-2686, USA Article History: Received 19 January 2009; Revised 5 May 2009; Accepted 7 May 2009