Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research

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 discovery and tracking of near-Earth asteroids. LINEAR was responsible for the majority of asteroid detections from 1998 until it was overtaken by the Catalina Sky Survey in 2005. As of 15 September 2011 (2011 -09-15), LINEAR had detected 231,082 new objects, of which at least 2,423 were near-Earth asteroids and 279 were comets. The instruments used by the LINEAR program are located at the Lincoln Laboratory's site on the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) near Socorro, New Mexico.