The Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS)

卡塔利娜实时瞬态调查 (CRTS)

• 批准号: 0909182
• 负责人: Stanislav Djorgovski
• 金额: $ 88.92万
• 依托单位: California Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-08-01 至 2013-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0909182&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Catalina; Real; Time; Transient; Survey

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Dr. Djorgovski and his team will use the data stream from the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) to search for transient astronomical objects including flare stars, gamma-ray bursts, and strong microlensing events. That survey uses two wide-field telescopes in Arizona and one in Australia to catalog objects in the Solar System, particularly asteroids on orbits that bring them close to Earth. The team will build an open optical-transient discovery engine to compare image from CSS with earlier images of the same piece of sky and identify sources that have brightened. The team will provide the resulting data stream on a public server accessed by Virtual Observatory protocols, so that it is available to the wider community for immediate followup observations. Graduate and undergraduate students will be trained by participating in the research. The team plans to work with Microsoft's World Wide Telescope project to present the event stream in a form accessible to amateur astronomers and the general public. This project will be the first that allows rapid followup of such a wide range of bright transient sources, and can act as a testbed to develop scientific strategies and procedures. The resulting science is potentially transformative, and will inform decisions on building and operating future facilities such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。Djorgovski博士和他的团队将使用NASA资助的卡塔利纳巡天（CSS）的数据流来搜索瞬态天文物体，包括耀斑星、伽马射线爆发和强微透镜事件。 该调查使用亚利桑那州的两个宽视场望远镜和澳大利亚的一个望远镜来编目太阳系中的物体，特别是轨道上的小行星，使它们接近地球。 该团队将建立一个开放的光学瞬态发现引擎，将CSS图像与同一片天空的早期图像进行比较，并识别已经变亮的光源。 该小组将在一个通过虚拟观测台协议访问的公共服务器上提供由此产生的数据流，以便向更广泛的社区提供这些数据流，用于立即进行后续观测。 研究生和本科生将通过参与研究进行培训。 该团队计划与微软的World Wide Telescope项目合作，以业余天文学家和公众可以访问的形式呈现事件流。 该项目将是第一个允许快速跟踪如此广泛的明亮瞬态源的项目，并可以作为开发科学策略和程序的试验平台。 由此产生的科学具有潜在的变革性，并将为建设和运营未来设施（如大型综合巡天望远镜）的决策提供信息。