By 
April 2nd, 2014
It is tagged the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS for short.
Funded by NASA, ATLAS is being developed by the University of Hawaii as an asteroid impact early warning system.
When ATLAS is completed in 2015, it will consist of two telescopes, 100 miles apart, which automatically scan the whole sky several times every night looking for moving objects.
ATLAS can provide one day’s warning for a 30-kiloton “town killer,” a week for a 5-megaton “city killer,” and three weeks for a 100-megaton “county killer.”
Project officials for ATLAS report that a scaled-down prototype — “Pathfinder” — is now live on Mauna Loa, Hawaii Island. It is automatically scanning the sky and sending the data back to Honolulu.
ATLAS Principal Investigator, John Tonry.
Credit: ATLAS
Two observatories
Furthermore, on March 25, the ATLAS team obtained first light with a new MicroCam3 device outfitted on a Takahashi Telescope.
While MicroCam3 has a 16-megapixel detector, the eventual ATLAS camera will have a 110-megapixel detector, which is housed in a cryostat to keep the detector cooled to -50° C.
When fully operational, the two-telescope ATLAS system will survey the sky four times each night and take around 3,000 images per night.
By the end of 2014 the ATLAS team expects to have two observatories: one at the current location on Mauna Loa, Hawai’i Island, and a second on Haleakala, 100 miles northwest on Maui.
Roster of jobs
There is a roster of ATLAS errands that can be accomplished besides the important job of searching for dangerous asteroids. They include:
•Search for habitable planets outside our Solar System
•Look for denizens of the outer Solar System, such as dwarf planets like Pluto or Eris or a Nemesis star
•Search for minimoons that orbit Earth
•Track space junk
As noted in a recent ATLAS update: “We are very happy with our overall progress. We must be at full productivity in two years, and it’s impressive that the team is already able to find and report asteroids right now.”
Check out this informative video, detailed by ATLAS principal investigator, John Tonry.
Go to: http://fallingstar.com/video-1.php
For more information on ATLAS, go to the project’s website at:
Posted in Space News
