New telescope will hunt dangerous asteroids

__________________
Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

We only need about a hundred more to cover the entire sky though...

__________________

Well, Pan-STARRS is designed to cover the entire sky every month (at least what is visible at Hawaii at a given time of the year). LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) is designed to be even more efficient (provided it gets the required funding). Of course, more telescopes wouldn't hurt...

__________________
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman

Larger than an aircraft hangar? Topic: The Big Picture

Oh.

Pan-STARRS Prototype Being Built on Maui

__________________
0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

HUH??? How did you come with "about a hundred more"?

Did you not read the article? It will cover the whole sky (visible from Hawaii - +90 deg to -70 deg - which is most of the sky) three times a month. How do you figure that 25 times that many scopes are needed to cover the southern circumpolar regions?

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

I'm thinkin he's thinkin' of simulataneous coverage at all times.

And would be good for transient events...

The University of Hawaii's newest telescope, called PS1, was dedicated on Friday, June 30 in a ceremony on the summit of Haleakala. The telescope is a prototype for the larger Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS, telescope scheduled to start scanning the skies for "killer asteroids" in 2010.

Institute for Astronomy Director Rolf Kudritzki described the dedication of PS1 as "a historic event, since Pan-STARRS is the most important University of Hawaii telescope project in 30 years." PS1 achieved "first light" in late June, when engineers obtained test images of a number of stars.

Read more

__________________
`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

It doesn't matter that it can't see the southernmost sky. Asteroids can't continuously occupy space below the ecliptic. Any asteroid hiding there will be in the high northern sky a half an orbit later.

I wonder why they will choose to survey the whole sky rather than concentrate on the right ascension opposite the Sun. Asteroids are constantly in motion. Any asteroid whose aphelion is less than Earth's orbit can't hit Earth (at least at present), and any asteroid whose aphelion is greater than Earth's orbit will have an opposition with Earth once every few years. At this point, the asteroid is closest to Earth and at its brightest due to the minimum distance and maximum phase angle. It will also have its highest proper motion against the background stars, making opposition the easiest time to detect such objects. So it would make sense to me to concentrate the observations along the right ascension 12 hours away from the Sun, and ambush the asteroids as they cross this region.

Perhaps they are planning on scanning the whole sky, but concentrating more heavily on this area.
Of course such a method would miss asteroids whose orbits are entirely interior to Earth's. These asteroids could be perturbed by Venus into Earth-crossing orbits. It would also miss 1:1 resonant asteroids that retreat from Earth before reaching opposition, although thses asteroids would also have to be perturbed out of their resonant orbits before a collision is possible.

Even if such asteroids were perturbed into Earth-crossing orbits, they would likely orbit the Sun thousands of times before making a threatening approach to Earth, making them detectable.

Update:

Because the sources funding the project, and many of the scientists involved, don't care about asteroids. Many are intererested in more distant events, such as supernovae and gamma-ray bursts.